got my alpha test invitation to edgeio a couple of days ago. It's supposed to launch on February 27th.
At first glance, it has a very slick interface, very web 2.0. No wonder, one of the co-founders, is the world-famous Mike Arrington of techcrunch !
What is it ? from their about page:
“What is edgeio?
edgeio dynamically organizes listings published from RSS enabled websites making them discoverable via the edgeio website and through an open set of web services. Our goal is to give publishers of all sizes the means to control how their content is published, discovered, and consumed. By doing so, edgeio provides everyone easy, up to date, access to content from the Internet's edge.
Anyone with an RSS enabled website can publish content through edgeio. Using tags, publishers direct edgeio to index and organize their content. No more listing fees, complicated forms to fill in, and struggling to keep content synchronized across multiple websites. Just post it, use appropriate tags, and edgeio takes care of the rest.
A blogger can publish an item for sale and have it listed on edgeio within a matter of seconds. An auto dealer with an RSS enabled website can publish their inventory in real-time to edgeio's network. Using tags indicating location, realtors can reach buyers in specific communities around the world. Podcasters and video bloggers, can use tags to describe their work making it easily discoverable in the edgeio network of websites.”
I'm not sure whether I really understand what it really is or what it's meant to be. A Craig's list of anything RSS ? A search engine in the spirit of Technorati, but using only TAGS to find content ? There's a BusinessWeek article describing it a bit more. It has a lot of bells & whistles, such as geographic search, but the baseline I think is that it extends the tag system pioneered by Flickr to make any tag in the world searchable in a central repository in an easy way. Businessweek talks about a number of B-models, but I guess that like anything web 2.0 these days (think digg.com here), a critical mass is what the founding team is after.
Anyone else testing the service out there ? Jeff ?
(by the way, I used the program I talked about in the previous post to capture a screenshot and post directly to flickr…)
