Edgeio Falls By The Wayside

Edgeio is closing its doors, after two years and who knows how much money spent.

As Mike Arrington, one of the founders, sums it up,

[...] although the service rolled out on schedule, the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met.

I am still intrigued with the concept, as I said when they launched (see Rob Hof on Edgeio): people simply post on their blog (or other website) that they have something for sale, and a service, like Edgeio, trolls through the RSS feeds, and pulls out things that are for sale.

I think that this is a case of being too ahead of the curve, since it requires people to know a lot about techie things like tags and RSS feeds. Plus, pulling something from a blog and reposting it elsewhere removes it from its innate social scale: the community of people who read the blog in the first place. It de-socializes the touch point, and makes it a flat mass market.

Might have been more interesting to allow some kind of widgets to be plugged into Edgeio-style posts, to support transactions, or Q&A about the goods. This could take place on the blog, as opposed to some other site.

On the other hand, Edgeio as a service embedded in social networks? I am sure we will see a lot of that. Things there are a lot more structured and explicitly social than the blogosphere. And it has a built-in social element too: who better to buy your second hand bike than people who know and trust you?