Pete - thanks for the review. We are looking forward to launch and seeing how things evolve.
Vaibhav Domkundwar - iNods.com
· 3 years ago
Pete: This is a really well written post. Its simple and explains the power of the edge very elegantly. Having met a lot of people recently to discuss inods, I encountered a segment of non-believers who do not buy the fact that the edge will eventually prevail. Though time will prove it, I believe there is definite need for a strong push for an 'Edge Empowered' movement. Its a simple value proposition for the users who stand to benefit the most.
We don't know if its inods that will prevail in reveiws search, or edgeio in classifieds, but we hope iNods, edgeio, kritx and others really provide the momentum to drive towards an edge publishing model which empowers the users and facilitates a consumer- or business-process in a much better way.
Franklin Reichaus
· 3 years ago
Can anyone contribute comment (the blog-less, for example)? Also, are all the listings on the edgio home page, or do they require people who post a listing to also show some results?
I guess the biggest question is, why would anyone use this as opposed to craig's list? Distribution? Ease of use? Please comment because the entire idea is somewhat puzzling to me.
Frank Gruber
· 3 years ago
Franklin, Maybe I can shed some light on a few of your questions. First of all, edgeio will be gathering all of the listings it finds in blogs and websites and putting them on the edgeio search engine (making it easy to find those 'hidden gems'). Edgeio will then give you the ability to search by area and category and should yield extremely relevant results (powerful and relevant search utility). Additionally, edgeio leverages the blogosphere by allowing anyone with a blog to post an ad directly from their own blog (could it get any easier to place an ad?) which gives you more control over the ad and gets rid of the middle man. Edgeio is not only blog listings though, it could be listings on others websites too.
Great write-up Pete.
Cheers, Frank
Zack W. Handley
· 3 years ago
This is an idea that has been kicked around for the past year or 2 (to my knowledge) and will come from a variety of companies BUT what is to stop someone (or ebay / amzn /goog/craigs ....) from starting edgia.com and searching for 'listing' tags on blogs and displaying them as a classifieds site? What is there to stop me from building an applet that searches for listings that I am interested and places them on my homepage/blog?
I think that is why no one has done this yet. *As I Understand the Business Model*, It is impossible to defend.
David
· 3 years ago
1. Kudos to Edgeio for nailing the essence of the "edge/web 2.0" mission.
2. Pete...kudos to you, sir, for nailing the essence of Edgeio. I really enjoy your blog. It just "feels good" to come here. Know what I mean? :)
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
OK, a few people are skeptical about defensibility. I'm not gonna speak for Mike, but I've written what is perhaps a more detailed look at the potential problems with Edgeio over at Squash. I'll reprint it here for the sake of completeness:
Hey, good to see someone trying to point out some of the negatives.
Well, I don’t think the positivity towards Edgeio has anything to do with Mike being involved - if it was crap, I would have told him. I think perhaps it’s an idea that’s ahead of the curve, but I don’t think it’s too far ahead.
I think a lot of the skepticism towards innovative companies comes from the notion that it “won’t appeal to mainstream audiencesâ€, but that ignores the trend that mainstream audiences always, always catch up with the early adopters eventually. They might not, for instance, subscribe to thousands of feeds, but they will eventually use Memeorandum-style aggregators or personalization engines to filter and prioritize what they read online. And equally, your Mom and Dad might not install a Wordpress blog, but increasingly mainstream users do upload content in a sharable, syndicated form - photo-sharing (especially from camera phones), product reviews and the like. Edge aggregators can place themselves in the middle of this stream of free content and build a toll booth - be it for classified listings, product reviews, calendar entries or any of the formats supported by structured blogging and microformats. I think CoComment is an excellent example of an edge aggregator, although I’m sure the creators didn’t design it with that in mind.
OK, so on to your idea about Edgeio getting cloned. Of course it will. Just like Del.icio.us got cloned. Digg, too. And Digg is a good example - it’s essentially an aggregator (albeit a human-powered one) that filters news stories. Some of the clones are just as good as Digg, but haven’t gained the same traction. Why? My guess is network effect - Digg experienced strong network effects, and Edgeio is likely to enjoy a similar effect if it takes off.
My point about eBay is that all centralized content stores will eventually get disrupted by decentralization. Edgeio might not do it, but someone will. Perhaps Google. Either way, the walled gardens seem under threat.
But you also raise an interesting point - whether companies should try to build ahead of the curve, or simply take these ideas to mainstream audiences. We fawn over sites like Flickr, but really it has tiny traffic compared to mainstream websites. Even YouTube - which is only a few months old - is about to overtake Flickr in terms of reach and traffic. MySpace, meanwhile, has the kind of traffic that hosted blogging sites could only dream of. So yes, we’re myopic - and my recent adoration of CoComment is probably a symptom of that. Perhaps we should care more about bringing these services to mainstream audiences and less about pursuing ideas that are “lightyears†ahead of the game.
Most businesses fail in some way, so being a skeptic is always a safe bet. Edgeio makes sense to me and anyone else who has been studying web trends. But whether that insight converts into business success is impossible to tell.
Greg Yardley
· 3 years ago
My only question - how does edgeio know to come to your blog to pick up the listing?
A pinger that lets edgeio know to swings by when you're ready for it = yay!
Yet another crawler that trawls through a thousand different blogs for every actual posting it finds = nay!
The risk of spawning a hundred different imitators with a hundred different crawlers, all of them crawling through a thousand different blogs for every actual posting they find = ack, double nay!
I suspect edgeio, while it sounds neat, is only going to hasten the rise of sophisticated crawler-blockers - at first at the individual webserver level and then upstream at the ISPs.
isb
· 3 years ago
Pete,
The network effect principle doesn't exactly apply to edgeio. In the case of Digg, the utility of the service increases as many people participate in the service - for eg, submit and "digg" the stories. On the other hand, the utility of the blog classifieds market will increase if more blogs publish listings, but that doesn't mean edgeio alone will reap the benefits. Think of it this way, edgeio = aggregator, digg = filter.
fred krueger
· 3 years ago
How does edgeio work with RSS?
I think the idea of agregating blog classifieds is brilliant. But edgeio had better move fast or other competitors (I am thinking Google) will move in quickly...
Damian
· 3 years ago
I think one reason why Digg is getting an even stronger network effect is the ability, on a number of tech-related content sites, to digg a story right there. Content creators have a vested interest in having the option on the page and it really makes the network affect take off.
I think, for edgeio to fly, they're going to have to have people ping their service ala weblogs. Searching for "Listing" strikes me as a bad approach. But of course pinging gets us back to the centralized aggregator role. Leaving it as search means they can be easily taken out. In the end, I think the technology is rather irrelevant - it is all about market liquidity. The web is littered with dead classifieds sites - only if the market manages to get both buyers and sellers to the table will it be successful. I guess while I find the idea very neat, I'm not clear on how whether or not it will create the liquidity. But of course, I'm sure that is what the site owners are about to find out!
Pete Cashmore
· 3 years ago
Lawrence,
I totally agree with your 3 points - they may be too far ahead of the curve and they're also trying to create a new behaviour. (I think the ultimate edge plays will mould themselves around existing behaviours. Think iNods, but more sophisticated. CoComment is another example.) Getting the big sites to play fair is indeed tough.
Damian,
I agree, the idea is an appealing one, but the liquidity may or may not be created.
Tom Mandel
· 3 years ago
This is *good for* eBay, rather than an eBay killer. I don't so much mean edgeio, but the idea itself. If tagging a blog post 'listing' gets it on edgeio, how long will it be before tagging it 'eBay' gets it on eBay? Now, this may be fine for edgeio - either eBay acquires it or another big player has to buy it to compete w/ eBay's edge function. But, that's a flip model not a business model. And, no, it doesn't change the aggregation structure. Put another way, Pete, a new 'submit form' is insufficient to change what you're *submitting to*.
Erik Fritsch
· 3 years ago
Very good post and I enjoy your content - very well written.
All Comments
We don't know if its inods that will prevail in reveiws search, or edgeio in classifieds, but we hope iNods, edgeio, kritx and others really provide the momentum to drive towards an edge publishing model which empowers the users and facilitates a consumer- or business-process in a much better way.
I guess the biggest question is, why would anyone use this as opposed to craig's list? Distribution? Ease of use? Please comment because the entire idea is somewhat puzzling to me.
Maybe I can shed some light on a few of your questions. First of all, edgeio will be gathering all of the listings it finds in blogs and websites and putting them on the edgeio search engine (making it easy to find those 'hidden gems'). Edgeio will then give you the ability to search by area and category and should yield extremely relevant results (powerful and relevant search utility). Additionally, edgeio leverages the blogosphere by allowing anyone with a blog to post an ad directly from their own blog (could it get any easier to place an ad?) which gives you more control over the ad and gets rid of the middle man. Edgeio is not only blog listings though, it could be listings on others websites too.
Great write-up Pete.
Cheers,
Frank
I think that is why no one has done this yet. *As I Understand the Business Model*, It is impossible to defend.
2. Pete...kudos to you, sir, for nailing the essence of Edgeio. I really enjoy your blog. It just "feels good" to come here. Know what I mean? :)
Hey, good to see someone trying to point out some of the negatives.
Well, I don’t think the positivity towards Edgeio has anything to do with Mike being involved - if it was crap, I would have told him. I think perhaps it’s an idea that’s ahead of the curve, but I don’t think it’s too far ahead.
I think a lot of the skepticism towards innovative companies comes from the notion that it “won’t appeal to mainstream audiencesâ€, but that ignores the trend that mainstream audiences always, always catch up with the early adopters eventually. They might not, for instance, subscribe to thousands of feeds, but they will eventually use Memeorandum-style aggregators or personalization engines to filter and prioritize what they read online. And equally, your Mom and Dad might not install a Wordpress blog, but increasingly mainstream users do upload content in a sharable, syndicated form - photo-sharing (especially from camera phones), product reviews and the like. Edge aggregators can place themselves in the middle of this stream of free content and build a toll booth - be it for classified listings, product reviews, calendar entries or any of the formats supported by structured blogging and microformats. I think CoComment is an excellent example of an edge aggregator, although I’m sure the creators didn’t design it with that in mind.
OK, so on to your idea about Edgeio getting cloned. Of course it will. Just like Del.icio.us got cloned. Digg, too. And Digg is a good example - it’s essentially an aggregator (albeit a human-powered one) that filters news stories. Some of the clones are just as good as Digg, but haven’t gained the same traction. Why? My guess is network effect - Digg experienced strong network effects, and Edgeio is likely to enjoy a similar effect if it takes off.
My point about eBay is that all centralized content stores will eventually get disrupted by decentralization. Edgeio might not do it, but someone will. Perhaps Google. Either way, the walled gardens seem under threat.
But you also raise an interesting point - whether companies should try to build ahead of the curve, or simply take these ideas to mainstream audiences. We fawn over sites like Flickr, but really it has tiny traffic compared to mainstream websites. Even YouTube - which is only a few months old - is about to overtake Flickr in terms of reach and traffic. MySpace, meanwhile, has the kind of traffic that hosted blogging sites could only dream of. So yes, we’re myopic - and my recent adoration of CoComment is probably a symptom of that. Perhaps we should care more about bringing these services to mainstream audiences and less about pursuing ideas that are “lightyears†ahead of the game.
Most businesses fail in some way, so being a skeptic is always a safe bet. Edgeio makes sense to me and anyone else who has been studying web trends. But whether that insight converts into business success is impossible to tell.
A pinger that lets edgeio know to swings by when you're ready for it = yay!
Yet another crawler that trawls through a thousand different blogs for every actual posting it finds = nay!
The risk of spawning a hundred different imitators with a hundred different crawlers, all of them crawling through a thousand different blogs for every actual posting they find = ack, double nay!
I suspect edgeio, while it sounds neat, is only going to hasten the rise of sophisticated crawler-blockers - at first at the individual webserver level and then upstream at the ISPs.
The network effect principle doesn't exactly apply to edgeio. In the case of Digg, the utility of the service increases as many people participate in the service - for eg, submit and "digg" the stories. On the other hand, the utility of the blog classifieds market will increase if more blogs publish listings, but that doesn't mean edgeio alone will reap the benefits. Think of it this way, edgeio = aggregator, digg = filter.
I think the idea of agregating blog classifieds is brilliant. But edgeio had better move fast or other competitors (I am thinking Google) will move in quickly...
I think, for edgeio to fly, they're going to have to have people ping their service ala weblogs. Searching for "Listing" strikes me as a bad approach. But of course pinging gets us back to the centralized aggregator role. Leaving it as search means they can be easily taken out. In the end, I think the technology is rather irrelevant - it is all about market liquidity. The web is littered with dead classifieds sites - only if the market manages to get both buyers and sellers to the table will it be successful. I guess while I find the idea very neat, I'm not clear on how whether or not it will create the liquidity. But of course, I'm sure that is what the site owners are about to find out!
I totally agree with your 3 points - they may be too far ahead of the curve and they're also trying to create a new behaviour. (I think the ultimate edge plays will mould themselves around existing behaviours. Think iNods, but more sophisticated. CoComment is another example.) Getting the big sites to play fair is indeed tough.
Damian,
I agree, the idea is an appealing one, but the liquidity may or may not be created.