Mike Masnick of Techdirt asked in a comment on Rob Huf's blog at BusinessWeek: "What's the benefit [of Edgio] over Craigslist or eBay?" Keith Teare of Edgio has already responded, but I think an essential and profoundly important point is being missed... The key difference between these three services can be found in how they get their data. Edgio is an "open" service that aggregates data which is openly published anywhere on the web while CraigsList and eBay are closed, wall-garden sites that only provide service to data that has been published within the confines and control of their "walled-gardens."
Edgio is one of the first commercial services to leverage the extraordinary power of Structured Blogging and the "semantic web" by aggregating structured content published on any of the millions of blogs in the open web. The Edgio service provides the same "open and equal access" to some kinds of structured data that web search engines have long provided to unstructured web pages. Any web page, unless somehow protected, can be sucked into any search engine or discovery service to help generate traffic for the publishing site and ease discovery for end-users. We all benefit from a competitive arena in which a variety of search and discovery service providers rely on the same freely available data upon which to build their constantly improving services. Publishers benefit, of course, since the competition among service providers tends to improve the ability of people to find the sites that interest them. If you publish either pages or structured data on the open web, competition among the search and discovery services assures you that the search engines will be constantly improving their ability to generate traffic for your site.
On the other hand, the legacy, "old-web," "walled-garden" sites like CraigsList and eBay only provide service for data which is published behind their walls and in their proprietary systems. Data which is published within one of them is almost inevitably not published within any other service or on the open web. Thus, there is no opportunity for publishers and users to benefit from the kind of vibrant competition that forces innovation on the open web. Closed, walled-garden services essentially steal "network effects" from the open web and use those network effects to their own benefit. People use CraigsList and eBay not because they are the most excellent services, in terms of features or ease of use, rather they use these services because they have pulled the most data and the most users off the open web and into their closed, walled-garden systems.
Of course, not everyone has a blog or web site on which to publish the structured data serviced by sites like Edgio, CraigsList and eBay. The closed systems often use this fact as an excuse for continuing to operate as they do now -- relying on tools that only publish within their closed systems. The approach taken by Edgio is drastically different and should be an example to all others! If you wish to have data included within Edgio but don't have your own blog or web site, Edgio solves this problem not by giving you tools that publish only within Edgio but rather by simply providing you with your own free personal blog and RSS feed on which to publish data. Of course, since they provide you with an open blog and openly accessible RSS feed, any data you publish on your Edgio hosted blog is just as available to any other services as the data that you might publish on any other blog! Hopefully, we'll see new Web 2.0 services following Edgio's example in the future. Hopefully, we'll also see the "old-web" services like CraigsList, eBay, Monster, etc. adopt this approach to data gathering and open publishing in the future.
Clearly, the Edgio developers understand that building an open eco-system of classified postings is the only way to prevent the anti-innovation, anti-competitive environment that benefits closed-wall providers like CraigsList and eBay. It is also clear that the Edgio developers are confident that by getting to market first with this "new-web" (Web 2.0?) approach to services based on Structured Blogging, they will gain an experience and learning advantage that will allow them to not only establish but maintain a leadership position based on better open services. We should wish them well and look forward to the inevitable innovative competition that will leverage the same structured data that Edgio builds on.
In the world of Structured Blogging, you compete not by "capturing" people's data within your proprietary system but by providing better service to data published on the open web and accessible to all your competitors. The source of competitive advantage is in providing the best service, not in building high walls around other people's data. Let's all hope that many others follow Edgio's example in helping to exploit and build this new, innovative and open web of structured data.
bob wyman
Hmm. I understand all of this, and don't doubt any of it... but the thing that *no one* has yet explained to me is who are the people complaining that Craigslist and eBay aren't open enough? What's the *pain* being solved?
I certainly like the idea of more open systems that allow service providers to compete on the basis of open data, but the equation that's still being missed is why people are going to jump on this system.
From your post above, about the only thing I can figure out is that it makes more sense for them *if* other providers also work off of this data. In other words, the power of Edgeio isn't in Edgeio, but in the fact that if Edgeio competitors come along there will be competition to offer better services off of the data? We've noted on Techdirt that there are a few such companies that see to be coming up, but we still haven't seen any indication that people are so upset with their eBay/Craigslist experience that they're jumping on alternatives.
I guess I'm still waiting to see the pain point. Keith has told me what he believes the pain point is, but I haven't seen an upswell of people who have that pain point.
Posted by: Mike Masnick | April 09, 2006 at 16:13
Both Craigslist and Ebay push out RSS feeds.
Posted by: nick gogerty | April 09, 2006 at 21:39
Edgeio is a neat idea. However, I can't imagine posting a classified listing on my blog. It's just not what my readers are looking for.
Posted by: Jonathan Boutelle | April 17, 2006 at 16:31
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