BigShinyThing

As reported over at TechCrunch, new-on-the-block categorizer Vast has summed the appeal of a great dataset and a flexible API into three little words: Steal This Site.

It’s an irresistable offer! Until you think it through:

• Steal, as in: use all our data, innovate. Do your thing, but make sure we get a namecheck. Come play with our toys, but it’s our game and our rules. [Abbie Hoffman must be spinning in his grave.]
• This Site, as in: we’re cornering the market. Everyone will be part of our ecosystem, just like Google.

We’ve written at length about the DotCom 2.0 innovators’ use of public APIs as part of a ’stealth’ strategy which creates space for revenue-making media and profits from others’ innovation. Web 2.0 might be all candy-apps and free data, but in many respects, web service providers like Vast hark back to the old days of bureau-hosted mainframe databases — if they pull the plug, all those cool, written-in-five-minutes-over-a-double-chai-latte applications that rely on them will be dead in the water.

Web 2.0 runs on the fuel of community-driven content, but the engines that grind value from that content are as centralised as ever. As Bruce Sterling put it recently in a well-worth-reading speech, paraphrasing Alan Liu (of The Laws of Cool fame:

[...] in the guise of empowering users through all this participatory fooforaw, Web 2.0 is actually a ploy to return the Internet’s technical power to the specialized geek clique that originally built Web 1.0. They stole our revolution, now we’re stealing it back. And selling it to Yahoo.

Don’t get us wrong — Vast looks cool. Very cool. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You’re not stealing their site. You’re spreading their meme, helping them corner their market, expanding their media surface. Bigging up their value for the inevitable IPO or selloff. And good for them: this is what late capitalism looks like, and damned if we aren’t part of it. But hey — we like a good old fashioned backlash as much as anyone.