Edgeio launches private preview

This past weekend, Michael Arrington and company sent out invites for a sneak preview of the new classified site, Edgeio. I have to start by saying that Edegio is one of the most beautifully designed sites that I’ve seen in a long time (thanks to Fred Oliveira). Here’s how Edgeio explains what they do:

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.

Basically, edgeio aggregates content from any RSS enabled website. More specifically, they allow you to put a classified ad on your site, tag it as “listing”, and edgeio will pull that info from your site, via RSS, and organize it in the appropriate category on edgeio. I think this is a great concept, especially now that more people and companies are using blogs and making their content RSS accessible.

Signing up was very easy, as they don’t require a bunch of unnecessary information. However, claiming my blog was slightly confusing; they didn’t say anything about entering my rss feed but only stated to enter “website url”. After a couple of tries I figured it out though. They just need a little more information/explanation. They also require a little snip of code to be put in your code or on your listing page, so that they can “validate” your site. The other thing I noticed is their categories are slightly “jumbled” and has the potential of getting really crazy depending on how those categories are created. I would assume that they’re created based on categories set up by the site that they pull the listing from. Either way, I’m sure they’ll figure a good way to handle this in the long run.

As I mentioned before, edgeio is very well designed and for the most part has intuitive navigation. They smartly used AJAX in several places and have RSS feeds for all of the information that you could possibly want. Edgeio also offers a banner code to put on your page, or I guess on any site to help promote your listings. Another cool thing I noticed is that you can link your profiles from ebay, linkedin and Flickr, with the hope of having potential buyers get to know/trust you a little better. I hope they will come up with some sort of rating/reputation system in the future.

Overall, I think edgeio is a great concept. I do however, see a long hard road a head of them for acquiring user, both sellers and buyers. I hope they have some great marketing ideas up their sleeves. I’m not so sure if they’re going to be the ultimate destination for all classifieds but I do see them being a great source for employment and business related listings. I’ve seen a few articles questioning if edgeio will be they Ebay killer. I don’t ever see this happening but I do think, if enough people adopt this concept, then they could be a Craigslist competitor.

I wish edgeio much success and I for sure will use them for all of my future classified listings. I would encourage others to give them a try as well.

technorati tags: techcrunch, edgeio, ebay, craigslist, webreakstuff