A very early look at Edgeio

How early are we talking Mike?

Any betas for TechCrunch readers?

Hi Cadence, we’ll be notifying everyone who signs up via email on the site the moment the service is live. If you’d like a preview, please email me and I’ll set up a demo.

Hi Michael,

Would you be able to review Closo.com? It won’t be a conflict of interest I don’t think lol

Thanks for the update Mike.

Honor = shameless plug

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word "listing" (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the "listing" tag and index them on Edgeio.com.
How are you going to prevent spammers from exploiting this to not only tag all sorts of irrelevant data and mess with your search results (and make your site useless), but also stop people who get their own items ranked higher by exploiting the system? You also have the problem mentioned by Vaibhav in the comments, someone could come in and create a competing service to search for the "listing" tag and steal your business. Lets wait for Edgeio to spend all of its advertising budget telling everyone to add the "listing" tag to their blogs and then BAM a competitor releases their competing product.
Biz model? For one, Edgeio plans to charge Powersellers 25 cents a day to buy top positions on the page for their local listings.
Skewing search results based on paid listings is not cool unless paid results are kept separate from non-paid results, ala google. Users need relevant results, not paid ones, so watch how you implement this.
Tell Fred he’s done an awesome job with the design. IMO, once you launch, users should be able to just glance at the front page and get a good idea of how the service works. You’re going to have an uphill battle trying to advertise this thing, so you better lay it all out there for your users and make it as easy as possible for them. I’ll have more things to say once I get a look at the final site, feel free to send me a beta invite if you want more insight.

wow, that sounds like a pretty cool idea. one question is: what the people will list? I think it might work very great in connection with our merchnadisnig service spreadshirt.com. maybe we can do some project together to promote this idea. Pls. contact me about this if there is interest (i don’t have your e-mail, will try it via linkedin as well). Lukasz

I genuinely like the idea behind Edgeio. Aggregating listings from the edge is a great way to disrupt the current centralized models. As a previous commenter mentioned, open models like this aren’t defensible in the normal way (ie. eBay owns the data and won’t let others use it), but I don’t think that’s a problem here. We’re talking about a market with strong network effects - once a critical mass of users appear at Edgeio, competitors will have a harder time gaining users. For a comparison, look at del.icio.us - you can easily export your links, but few people bother to switch. This is a market where first mover advantage might actually count for something.

And now I understand the interest in portable reputation systems. Of course if you build an eBay-like feedback system that users can take with them to other sites, the defensibility problem appears to get worse. But if you can figure out how to monetize the transactions that take place outside of your site (perhaps by tying the reputation system to a payment solution?) then you’d have something very powerful. I’ve struggled with ideas about portable reputations before - it’s a tough nut to crack.

Freaking brilliant. I wish this were live last week when I was trying to unload some Coldplay tickets off of our website. Brilliant. Brilliant.

Really interested to beta test this product. Good luck Mike.

“someone could come in and create a competing service to search for the “listing” tag and steal your business. Lets wait for Edgeio to spend all of its advertising budget telling everyone to add the “listing” tag to their blogs and then BAM a competitor releases their competing product.”

http://www.froogle.com

Michael, I think there may be a synergy between Edgeio and our service. Can we contact somehow?

Mike, this is great news. Looking forward to the first look at edgeio.

Inspite of the challenges facing the edge plays (iNods, included), I firmly believe that it is the way to go. There is a urgent need to decentralize power/content/value and empower the users who are creating it, in the first place.

Spam, competitive plays, unstructured content are all genuine problems but they also present strong barriers to entry for companies who address them in a defensible way.

All the very best to you and the edgeio team.

So you telling us you won’t write about Edgeio because you are involved?
Hey, there is no one you need to invite you to a preview. You can do it all yourself;)
Now, blog about Edgeio like you did with others;D

Just a few observations:

First, I think there’s value in this idea, but, it won’t replace the Craigslists of the Internet. If posting is free on online classified websites, people are likely to post their ads on as many popular classified websites as possible to reach more eyeballs. No different than posting your ads multiple times on Craigslist.

Second, one could argue that if an Edgeio user needs to modify his/her listing on Edgeio (which is likely after it’s plucked from a user’s blog site), why not go directly to Edgeio and do the heavy lifting there instead of doing the heavy lifting twice? This becomes even more apparent when you factor in the time to become a powerseller. Why not go directly to Edgeio’s website and do all the heavy lifting there at one time??? Hence, I see blogs becoming an entry point for Edgeio short-term (and giving Edgeio the much desired/needed content when pulling the trigger), but, in the long-term, the desire for efficiency may drive such users to go directly to Edgeio to post their ads. Finally, the duplication of efforts and time spent may grow significantly over time for such users as Edgeio competitors crop up.

Third, and along the lines of my second observation, users of online classified websites will always want to see the final product on a classified website after it’s been posted to make sure that it looks good. So, even if you post an ad on your blog, you’re not done since you will instinctively want to see the ad on Edgeio. And, what about the timing of the scraping? Will the ad get plucked immediately after it’s posted on your blog so you may immediately review/modify/powersell the ad? Or, will you have to wait and continually check back at Edgeio’s website to see when the ad has been posted to review/modify/powersell? If the latter, you will then have to remember to visit Edgeio’s website multiple times in order to eventually view the ad (unless you receive a notice from Edgeio). Finally, if there is a time lag between the posting of the ad on a user’s blog and when it appears on Edgeio’s website, then the Craigslists of the Internet clearly have the upper-hand. As Craig Donato stated at the forum, timing is very critical!!!

Fourth, I liked the locational slide bar on Edgeio’s website. Very clever! I hope this piece of technology isn’t patented.

There is a distinct gap in the market for powersellers - Craigslist (and Live Expo) will likely only cover casual sellers. There are thousands and thousands of eBay powersellers leaving due to high fees.

You know what would be sweet? A Peer to Peer daemon that lets you host your listings/items locally, which then gets indexed by a central server, and fed to potential customers via a web interface. Most webstores and powersellers have a dedicated 24 hour system, so uptime might not be an issue. By using usernames and passwords IP addresses shouldn’t be a problem either.

Think about it… Stores could list as much as they want, when they want, on a site that already has traffic.

What does the future of the online marketplace hold?