By now, most people have heard about the recently launched Edgeio. If you’re not familiar with Edgeio, here’s a good overview written by TechCrunch guest blogger Nik Cubrilovic. I’d really like to see Edgeio succeed but I have some doubts about people’s willingness to clutter their blogs with classified listings. I’ve visited the Edgeio site a few times since they officially launched on Feb. 27 and so far I’m not seeing a huge volume of listings.

Today (March 5, 2006) for all of California I’m seeing: 28 For Sale listings, 3 Autos listings, 4 Wanted listings, 2 Housing listings, 522 Jobs listings, 5 Events listings, 41 Other listings, 192 Services listings, and 2 Podcasts listings.

I know that Edgeio has only been out of beta for a week or so but I was surprised to see such a low number of listings given the amount of buzz that they generated leading up to their launch. I have looked through the faq’s and I can’t help but think that there is too much technical jargon being thrown around – using XML-RPC to claim an RSS enabled web site, ping servers, trackbacks, clustered tagging, etc. In order to gain any kind of critical mass, I think Edgeio will need to make the process of posting items for sale A LOT SIMPLER. People are busy and they just don’t wany to invest a lot of time in figuring out how to post an item for sale. With their current set-up, Edgeio is restricting their selling community to people who have blogs or web sites, and that is just too limiting in my opinion.

In the Mike Arrington interview, he announced that Edgeio will be rolling out new tools that will make the selling process simpler (i.e. sellers will not need to have a blog or a web site). Once those tools are rolled out (in the next couple of weeks according to Arrington) maybe we’ll see the volume of listings go up. As I mentioned earlier, I’d really like to see this succeed because I like the “listings from the edge” concept and I think eBay and craigslist could use some healthy competition. So if you’re a blogger, go sell something on Edgeio!

3/6/2006 Update:

I found an interesting post on Data Mining about Edgeio. The author has been charting the number of listings over time. Included in the post is a detailed response from Edgeio co-founder/CEO Keith Teare. According to Mr. Teare, the number of listings will jump from time to time as larger publishers come on board and listings. He also mentions the upcoming features targeted to non-bloggers.

3/11/2006 Update:

Edgeio has just rolled out a new feature called “Instant Add”. More details on the Edgeio blog.