Alexa Mashing Statsaholic – Why?
April 20, 2007 |
On a very slow day I finally found a very interesting story about the lawsuit against Statsaholic by Alexa. Alexa is suing Ron Hornbaker the developer of Statsaholic over the domain name Alexaholic, which was Hornbaker's original domain for the feature filled ranking site.
The depth of the story was reported by TechCrunch back in March, but essentially Statsaholic began to gain popularity because of their features, but changed their name and stopped using the conflicting Alexaholic domain to appease Amazon. Amazon got the lawyers involved and also blocked Statsaholic from accessing Alexa graphs even though other similar sites were still allowed access. This unprompted move effectively crippled Statsaholic.
The simple evident fact is that Hornbaker changed the name at the request of Alexa, and shut down the domain until things could be sorted out. Meanwhile Alex began to implement many of Statsaholic's innovative and successful features, and eventually turned off all capability to hot link to any Alexa graphs from offsite.
Obviously, Statsaholic had put a dent in Alexa's armor when people began to migrate to the new stat site. What brought my renewed attention to the story was a post by Mashable today calling for a petition to halt the legal proceedings. Pete Cashmore thinks the gravity of the suit is excessive and unnecessary, because of the relative harm already done to Hornbaker and Statsaholic's prior cooperation. The obvious cooperation in righting the situation by Hornbaker even before any legal action was taken really frames the whole situation in my view.
The situation has effectively crippled Statsaholic and the damages sought are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This will essentially pound Hornbaker and Statsaholic into dust. Besides Web 2.0 losing a really innovative and effective tool, Alexa would essentially be getting away with startup competition murder.
The irony of the whole situation is that Amazon has been wooing small developers at the Web 2.0 Expo for the last few days, lauding their openness to APIs and trying to share the very thing they have denied others. You know we call for ethics and fairness in every corner of Web 2.0, yet the companies that benefit from people's participation cannot seem to play fairly. Where is the connectedness in these dealings and what about an example to follow from one of the big players?
I was just using MySpace as an example of my perceived impression of Cashmore's objectivity. I suspect that if Alexa got emails from half of their users asking about this even, then there would be some accounting to be had.
From a rather Machiavellian point of view, any blogger who did not go along with this wave could be considered either above reproach (in the event that they refused a boycott on principle) or out of their mind given the political ramifications and relative power affecting change like this would place in their hands.
In a very real sense, the boycott and support there of, would empower bloggers (some more than others) with the authority of a grand jury (or the international equivalent). So, bloggers in support of "forcing" issues would obviously benefit the most, while "fence riders" would enjoy the secondary effects of any empowerment.
I think we can look at bloggers like Cashmore and yes You as representatives of a segment of Web 2.0. That is not an unreasonable tenant in the discourse of implications and what ifs. As for what "used to be", I used to drive 100 mph everywhere I went, but choose not to do that any more. Am I a speeder?