[mappy]

> I'm really surprised nothing like this has existed before

But how would you monetize it?

Unlike an RSS feed, you really don't know how the JSON response would be used, so you can't inject ads into it.

And if you charge for it, wouldn't people assume it would continue to work, but site "scrapers", regardless of how they are configured, are likely to break, so it would be tougher having customers pay for something that could break at any time leaving them having to figure out if its the service that's changed/broken or the page that's changed.

Don't get me wrong- some great businesses have been/are based on "scraping" in one way or another. However, as cool as this is, it's just another way to "scrape". If the person hosting the page would provide an API or JSON view instead, you'd be loads better off.

[nsgi]

Freemium, professional support, expanding it into an abstraction layer above the APIs for multiple services, selling a version that larger companies can run on their own servers which they might need for data security...

In any case, not everything has to be monetised.

[g00gler]

>However, as cool as this is, it's just another way to "scrape"

Isn't that the point? The demo seems like it'd be a lot easier, less verbose, and probably less brittle, than using cUrl/xpaths or otherwise parsing that HTML yourself.