3taps Company Writeup

3taps is an entity that positioned itself as a key advocate and provider for open access to public exchange-related data on the internet. It was fundamentally built as an information exchange platform designed to aggregate, organize, and distribute publicly available facts about the supply, demand, and prices for goods and services for the benefit of developers and end-users. The company???s core philosophy centered on the belief that access to transaction-specific data, such as postings for items for sale, housing, or job offerings, should be as open as possible to foster competition, increase efficiencies, and democratize opportunities in the exchange space.

Core Business and Mission

The primary function of 3taps was to operate a Data Commons for exchange-related data. This Data Commons served as a centralized, non-proprietary reservoir of public facts sourced from numerous publishers and locations across the web. The company's goal was to create an efficient clearing process for this data, which it considered to be in the public domain. This mission was driven by the co-founders' perspective on the importance of "liquidity" and "fluidity" in exchange marketplaces, seeking to prevent "discriminatory access" to essential market information.

The business model was one of a neutral data intermediary. 3taps would collect data that was publicly viewable and then syndicate that information through a proprietary technical platform. Their public stance was that they were only interested in publicly available facts that were not subject to copyright or other proprietary claims. The company was willing to accept data in multiple ways: through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from publishers who wished to contribute their postings, or through data-gathering techniques like scraping, which was performed either by 3taps directly (until a legal settlement) or by third parties who then contributed the data to the Data Commons.

Products and Services

The entire suite of 3taps' offerings revolved around its Data Commons and the technical mechanisms for interacting with it. The central products and services it offered were:

1. The Data Commons

This was the foundational product, a vast repository of public posting data from various sources. The data encompassed transaction-specific information across numerous categories, including classifieds such as real estate listings, goods for sale, and services offered. The service provided a common, normalized format for data that was disparate and often unstructured across its original source websites. The normalization process organized the data by category, location, and other key attributes, making it searchable and comparable.

2. Exchange-Related Data APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)

The mechanism by which developers accessed and contributed to the Data Commons was through APIs. 3taps offered both: * In-bound APIs: These interfaces permitted users, publishers, or third-party data providers to post new data, or add, edit, and delete existing postings within the Data Commons. * Outbound APIs: These were the core distribution tool, allowing developers to access the normalized, aggregated data in a variety of formats. This functionality enabled developers to build competitive, innovative, and user-friendly applications on top of the 3taps data, such as specialized search engines, mobile applications, and mashup sites that combined the posting data with other geographic or analytical tools. The search feature within the API effectively acted as a general-purpose search engine for the aggregated postings.

3. Data Advocacy and Legal Posture

While not a product in the traditional sense, 3taps' aggressive advocacy and legal defense of the open web and the right to access public data was a defining part of its public profile and service to its developer community. The company became a central figure in a landmark legal case, Craigslist Inc. v. 3Taps Inc., which dealt with the interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) as it relates to accessing public websites against the site owner's wishes. The company utilized its platform to publicly argue against what it viewed as the censorship of public data and a threat to the "open web" and innovation, positioning itself as a defender of data-user rights against anti-competitive gatekeeping.

In summary, 3taps functioned as a data clearinghouse. Its primary value proposition was the collection and normalization of high-volume, real-time exchange data, which it then exposed through an API to enable third-party innovation, essentially serving as a "One-Stop Data Shop for Developers."