Standing on the shoulders of giants - redux 23 Apr 2007

Last week, we wrote about "the problem with standing on the shoulders of giants". Our post questioned the logic behind building a buisiness around a mashup and focused specifically on how Mozilla's decision to build "social features" into Firefox had struck a hammer blow to Flock - a social browser built on top of Firefox. Well, now we have a similar situation with Amazon and Alexaholic. ZDNet has the scoop:

"Back in February of 2006, Ron Hornbaker, who was frustrated by how clumsy and clunky Alexa's website was, created a more efficient DHTML and Alexa graph data mashup and dubbed it Alexaholic. As word spread throughout the web community, Alexaholic started to gain a reputation as an excellent tool, and was for many a representation of what Alexa should be like.

"Two months or so after the launch, Hornbaker got a call from Geoffery Mack, the Product Manager at Alexa...Mack was very complimentary of what Hornbaker had put together and went so far as to even give a bit of a backhanded compliment to Alexaholic in their corporate blog...

"Flash forward to March of this year and Alexa's attitude had cooled towards Alexaholic. Trouble in paradise became apparent to many on the web when Alexa filed a URDP complaint with ICANN to get the domain taken away from Hornbaker because it contained the word 'alexa' in it.

"Thinking he could resolve this problem with a simple domain name change, Hornbaker changed the site to Statsaholic. This didn't seem to appease Alexa, who began to disrupt Statsaholic services by blocking Alexa graphs from appearing on the site. Not content to simply shut off access to Hornbaker (who admittedly was playing a defiant game of cat and mouse with Alexa), Alexa and Amazon upped the ante by filing a lawsuit against Hornbaker in Northern California District Federal court."

It will be interesting to see how this one pans out. As Om Malik points out, this case could spell the end of Web 2.0's Age of Innocence. While Amazon looks to have a strong legal case and will likely win in the law courts, they will probably lose in the court of public opinion. This will make it harder and harder for the company to persuade new developers and entrepreneurs to experiment with its open API frameworks.