Online classifieds service edgeio just launched. I tested the service out recently and on ZDNet I've posted my thoughts.
I love the concept of edgeio, because it's almost exactly the same ideal as the Structured Blogging initiative. Structured blogging means publishing different kinds of information - like events, reviews and classified ads - in a 'structured' format, so that aggregators can pick up the data from all over the Web. In fact, at the bottom of the structuredBlogging.org homepage is a pretty good description of what edgeio does!
"Now anyone can build applications or services based on the structure of an entry. Using Structured Blogging, [...] buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services."
Replace "any number of search services" with the word "edgeio" - that's what edgeio is about.
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Great feedback. It's absolutely our goal to leverage whatever data is out there, in whatever form. Which implicitly mean we'll want to support structured blogging formats as and when they become available.
We've actually already started adding preliminary support for the "hListing" microformat - some of that support is included in the just launched version - and more will definitively come as these standards mature.
Vidar
(dir.engineering at Edgeio)
Posted by: Vidar Hokstad | February 27, 2006 2:26 AM
According to Vidar, it seems as if Edgeio is going to embrace/support Structured Blogging as blogs leveraging the standard will provide more content to their service and drive the value of their platform. That being said, however, aren't the folks at Edgeio afraid that Google, or some other large player, is going to simply knock them out of the race? If information is published at the edge (blogs, myspace, etc.) via standard microformats, isn’t it fairly trivial for others to provide the same aggregation service rather easily? I am not picking on the folks at Edgeio, but I am just curious as to how they intend to create a sustainable competitive advantage in an environment where the posting methodology is clearly moving towards a set of standards. Also, I don't know if you had the chance to run through any of the comments regarding Edgeio on Jeff Jarvis' blog, but I am still wondering how they are going to address issues such as quality of results, trust, etc. Ebay has been successful as a transaction intermediary because they not only provide a large quantity of listings, but also provide some mechanisms to ensure quality of those listings. How is my mom going to know to trust Bob from Kansas, or have some notion of the quality of a washer, in this new decentralized world? When you decentralize transactions and move the posting process to the edge, these issues are once again thrust into the forefront. Although these issues are not necessarily particular to Edgeio, but are endemic to any distributed service seeking to move computing to the "edge," they still have to address them. Thoughts?
Posted by: Hooman Radfar | February 27, 2006 3:14 PM
Just noticed this post. I think we're going to start up work again on the next version of the SB plugins pretty soon (right now they're just in maintenance mode) so for those, we'll make sure you can make 'listing' posts.
I was planning to support whatever format edgeio preferred, but if there's an hListing microformat under development, that would be ideal.
Posted by: Phillip Pearson | March 5, 2006 3:00 PM