Keith Teare and Michael Arrington were kind enough to give me a tour of their new online listings service Edgeio last week and now that it's begun to open to invited users seems as good a time as any to write that conversation up.  I thought the concept, look and functionality of Edgeio all looked great.  I'll discuss those, but I'm also interested in some of the questions the service will face at it forges into a radically new space for information services.

The basic idea behind Edgeio is that off-site content producers (bloggers and others) will add meta-data to their own content that will designate certain information as intended to appear on Edgeio.  That content will include, but not necessarily be limited to, items for sale and events being promoted online.  There are a variety of ways this will be done, ranging from simple code like many people add for tags destined for Technorati to an even more usable text signifier that can be added for users uncomfortable with HTML.  Arrington says bloggers will be the primary contributors of content to Edgeio, but that any site that publishes an RSS feed will be able to participate.  All of this is good news for usability and diversity of content.
Content contributors, members, will create accounts wherein they will be able to fine-tune how their listings appear.  How this will play out remains to be seen, whether posting listings on your own site if you still enter Edgeio to fine tune those listings represents a significant convenience seems unclear to me.  In theory it will make listings easier, requiring less time in Edgeio itself for content providers, and it is certainly an interesting way to interact with a listing service.

People interested in viewing the listings in Edgeio will be able to visit the site and use a variety of cool search and display tools.  The geographic slider appears to be a powerful way to filter or expand any set of listings, though the categories may prove overly arbitrary.  It is nice to be able to slide visible results for your query from your city to your state, country or to global listings.  The choice to set up the hierarchy geographically instead of by milage may be a problem for some users.  Though Vancouver, Washington is only miles away from Portland Oregon, for example, appears inconsequential to a system organized by state.   Since thousands of locations world wide have been geocoded, this may be something that will be easy to change later.  I'm sure it's a hard choice to make and hardly one faced only by Edgeio.  As sliders become more common, though, I would surprised if location wasn't connected in users' minds with proximity and very particular systems of relevance.  Ebay's sort by proximity by mileage may have created certain expectations for users as well.

Edgio also allows users to view results via a hierarchy of tags.  This is smooth, intuitive and and something that other public information repositories could really benefit from learning from.

Edgeio not only consumes RSS feeds, it also publishes many types of feeds as well.  This was great to see, though unsurprising from a service that's all about Web 2.0.

One of the things enabled by this support of RSS will likely be the ability for bloggers and other content creators to resyndicate Edgeio listings on their own sites with a widget that will later be available to Edgeio members.  This makes a lot of sense given the service's role as an information broker and may represent as well a likely future development for many services distributing dynamic, public information. 

One possible bump in the road may be the use of Edgeio listings off site in obnoxious ways.  I asked whether Edgeio listings might appear in the future as the revenue source for blog spam ala Adsense (eg. fill the web with garbage blogs related to widely searched keywords and run the Edgeio listings for those keywords beside the blog in hopes frustrated visitors will click there).  Arrington says that revenue sharing will be a much smaller part of the widget equation than its use by bloggers for promoting their listings.  This seems like an unresolved but important issue.  They say, and I believe them, that they have every intention of doing what it takes to remain a positive force on the web.  I'll be curious to see how this feature rolls out, as it seems that resyndication and revenue sharing create technical difficulties and financial disincentives to do anything about this problem.

Overposting.   Craigslist is having a real problem with users over posting to their system.  I asked the Edgeio folks how they would deal with that.  They said that there was no real way to stop it, but that the system would be set up in a way that made overposting impractical.  The best way to increase visibility will be to pay a small fee (25 cents per day) for priority listing, not to post multiple times throughout a day.   Similarly, Arrington says their system will have some built in accountability because the source of the posted information will be known by Edgeio and spammers will be easily removed.  The system does have a very nice "flag as spam/ flag as miscategorized" feature - but given how quickly new blogs can be started anonymously I'm not sure how easy it will be to block spam based on the source.

Another question that faces all vendors in this space is raised by the ongoing law suit against Craigslist for the appearance of housing listings on their site that violated federal anti-discrimination law.  It's a tough question for new web information brokers - to what degree are you responsible for and how do you police user generated content? Are you a publisher?  Edgeio will for now have to rely on self-monitoring of postings after they appear, which may or may not satisfy Federal Courts 1.0 (if you will).  Arrington said in an email, " we are watching how law is developing in this space very closely and will make service changes over time to protect our community and the company."  I hope they don't have to make service changes, but in the event that they do I hope they are able to come up with some good ones.

Edgeio represents an exciting development in online information services and commerce.  It's a powerful example of the kinds of things made possible by microformats in blogging and RSS.  Edgeio may have a real first mover's advantage in this space.   The company certainly brings fresh energy to a set of possibilities and possible problems that larger, established vendors have been slow to respond to.  We'll see how things unfold for them.