vantagepoint

I think import.io is buggy to say the least, having used it in the past to scrape some websites, it was pain to work with. Kimonolabs is still very lacking in terms of ability to handle different websites, it is very much limited to a certain portion of the web, it looks like they are more about creating APIs...APIs that people are supposed to find interesting and valuable but like the topic of this question, it seems like it's only valuable to someone who has a direct need for that dataset, by itsef would serve no interest to say.

Having private access to Scrape.it, I can say that it focuses strictly on making a great tool and the ability to scrape websites without costing a fortune. I know the founders and they are extremely dedicated to making a tool that can pretty much handle anything you throw at it like AJAX, Single page apps, crawling selected links and all sub links after the page. They've just begun adding login and form support so should be able to play with those as well very soon. It only supports csv output at the moment but hopefully they can make available like API output.

On a slight offtopic note, I wonder why Japanese websites are still stuck in the mid 90s to early year 2000 style. One example of this is the imageboard type of websites, which interestingly enough has caught on here in the US.

I wonder if these better connectivity will bring more cross culture web designs or applications to both places.