Edgeio a product that is being developed by Archimedes Ventures partners Keith Teare and Michael Arrington made its demo debut yesterday as Keith showed the attendees of the SDForum. Edgeio has been a very intriguing project and is one that I posted about in November 2005 as I tried to figure out what Edgeio is? With the recent post by Rob Hof who saw the demo first hand, it appears the cat is out of the bag.
Edgeio from what I have gathered is a listing gathering service or aggregator for items on the web that are tagged with meta tags, which are used heavily in the blog world, as “listing.” Edgeio has a bot that crawls the Internet looking for these listings and then send a TrackBack to the blog or website when it finds them. The tag-line for Edgeio may say it all:
"Listings from the edge."
As Edgeio does just that in gathering listing from the blogosphere and other sources that may not have been previously pulled together and search-able thus it is being referred to as the 'edge.' Edgeio has an interface that gathers all of these listing together and provides tools to allow visitors to search on them by geographic area in addition to listing type which is distinguished by other meta tags that further explain the listing. For example if I was selling my car I could tag a post on my blog as Somewhat Frank as “listing” and “auto” and the crawler should swing in and pick it up and aggregate it back to the Edgeio console. The items listed in Edgeio could also be listing not from blogs but from other websites that tag their listings for retrieval since Edgeio is offering a free service to reposition their items and make them search-able through Edgeio thus driving additional traffic back to their site.
Edgeio leverages Web 2.0 techniques thus creating a more specific hybrid dubbed Classified Listings 2.0. It sounds like Edgeio could go head-to-head with SimplyHired, Oodle, Google Base and other listing aggregators to display listings from eBay, Craigslist, Careerbuilder, Cars.com and Apartments.com. There is definitely room in the listings aggregator space to support many options since they all should bring back slightly different result sets.
A tip of the hat goes out to Michael and Keith for Edgeio. This is a great idea, and I cannot wait till it’s live around the end of February. For more details and perspective on Edgeio check out these posts by Steve Boyd, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Mathew Ingram, The Syndicator Blog and Michael Arrington himself on CrunchNotes.
