Dappit - Scraping at its Finest

If I hadn't worked in eBay's Platform Solutions group, I wouldn't have a true appreciation for this. Go check out Dappit. While I have some questions whether the publishers/owners of targeted web content will be too happy with the service, Dappit essentially converts any html content (images, listings, text, etc) into a web service available via XML, RSS, alerts and more useful developer stuff. For all you scrapers out there this means not having to continually issue fixes to your scraping tools when a site's formatting changes. You can build an application to work off a true XML or RSS feed and let Dappit/Dapper do the heavy lifting of scraping site content.

What's truly cool about Dappit is its ability to group together content across multiple URLs/sites and bundle it into one web service group called a 'Dapp'. The Dapp is then made public and discoverable to any developer. Check out how many "eBay" Dapps that already exist. Scraping has always been the poor man's web service. Dappit has made scraping into a true web service platform -- which is both awesome (for developers) and frightening (for content owners) all at the same time.