THE DARE WARS

摘要

Ryan Sit glanced at his Gmail inbox and saw the message he had been waiting nine months to receive. Sit, a 29-year-old software developer from San Diego, is the founder of Listpic, a site that used bots-automatic software-based agents-to pull images from craigs-list for-sale listings and reorganize them into an easier-to-navigate, more attractive format. Instead of tediously clicking individual links to view photos, Listpic users could see them all collected onto a single page. The service was an instant success, and by early June it was pulling in more than 43,000 visitors a day and thousands of dollars a month in Google AdSense revenue.