Edgeio, the much-hyped Web 2.0 tag-sale site, has only been live for a few hours, but it’s already wearing a corpselike look.<\/p>\n
Cofounded by Michael Arrington, the madam of the great Web 2.0 brothel TechCrunch, Edgeio<\/a> gathers specially tagged classified ads from sundry RSS feeds, aggregates and categorizes them, and then republishes them at its own central site. (Or, as it snappily says of itself: “edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services.”) So, let’s say I finally decide to unload the old canoe that’s been patiently wasting away on sawhorses beside my garage for the last three years. I could post a little ad on this blog, wrap the text in a special tag and, thanks to the genius of Dave Winer, it would soon show up among various other disused personal flotation devices over at Edgeio. Now, of course, I have no desire whatsoever to start sticking classified ads on my blog, but never mind that – it’s the elegance of the idea that counts.<\/p>\n Edgeio is entering a crowded market that, thanks to cheap startup costs and an influx of VC greenbacks, shows no sign of thinning out for a good long while. It’s going to have to compete against a whole lot of other similar web services with names as silly as its own – eBay, Google Base, Craigslist (not so silly, actually), Monster, Oodle, Indeed, BlogBuy, Windows Live Expo, etc. – as well as many new ones that will no doubt spring up in the months ahead. It will also compete, of course, against newspapers, Yellow Pages, and other old-school media.<\/p>\n Now, at a techno-theoretical level, Edgeio is quite cool. But in the face of fierce competition, cool alone won’t cut it. And, at a business level, Edgeio would seem to have more than a few problems. There’s the avalanche-of-spam problem, which has already been much discussed. Edgeio says it will fight spam through a combination of “social controls” and filtering. Well, good luck. There’s the fraud problem. “It is currently being left up to the buyer and seller to close the transaction,” reports<\/a> TechCrunch, helpfully. There’s the walls-of-confusion problem, which Dion Hinchcliffe has described<\/a>. Ping servers? RSS feeds? Listing tags? Content on the edges? Jeez, I just want to sell a freaking canoe. There’s the who-wants-to-stick-classified-ads-on-their-blog problem (see above). There’s the most-people-who-sell-crap-don’t-even-have-blogs-or-websites problem. Yes, believe it or not, it’s true. There’s the old how-do-we-actually-make-money problem. Edgeio seems to be punting that question for the moment, but selling ads to run beside ads appears to be one idea for the future.<\/p>\n