Yeah, the point about RSS feeds seems a stretch, especially since, from the FAQ, "Paid and Permanent users can create a custom style that functions as an RSS feed for their Friends page. LiveJournal does not offer a built-in RSS feed for your Friends page." -- the paid feature is being able to use S2 to create a hacked together RSS feed, and not having your friends page available in RSS form per se.
It's purely academic at this point since the server abuse is more than enough to make LJ decide to rate limit the service, but the second point is pretty... odd.
Screen scraping is horrible because you load up a lot more than you need, and don't obey any built in rate limits that might be imposed by a proper data API. On the flip side, there could have been worse pages to use to grab the data.
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mmmag
no subject
Date: 2009-11-26 05:25 am (UTC)It's purely academic at this point since the server abuse is more than enough to make LJ decide to rate limit the service, but the second point is pretty... odd.
Screen scraping is horrible because you load up a lot more than you need, and don't obey any built in rate limits that might be imposed by a proper data API. On the flip side, there could have been worse pages to use to grab the data.