Edgeio and the Future of Walled Gardens
Keith Teare gave me a look at the service he's getting ready to launch – edgeio. In addition to being a good example of the new breed of web apps visually and interactively, edgio is an example of what I think is an important trend in the blogosphere. Edgeio is a search and indexing tool that aggregates content from the blogosphere in such a way that your blog can be used in new and interesting ways. In the demo, the emphasis is on classified ads, but Keith hastens to point out that the edgeio platform is designed for a wide variety of content types and applications.
For all the “hipness” of craigslist, the edgeio demo quickly drives home the point that while craigslist is an improvement over the traditional newspaper classified advertising section, it's built on its own outdated ideas that are about to be replaced, or at least innovated upon.
Why does craigslist host the advertising content for its classifieds? An obvious reason is that many of the craigslist advertisers don't have a blog, homepage or other site on which to host their ad. Fair enough, but in creating the classified ad, craiglist is giving them that hosting place. If a “space” for that ad is going to be created, why should it be inside craigslist's walled garden? If that same user comes back from a vacation to Kauai and wants to publish a review about her stay at the Westin there, Fodor's is more than happy to accept her review as freely donated content that it hosts in their own “walled garden”. Many Internet users, if they take inventory of all the useful content they've created and published over the past years, will realize that they do indeed have a significant “presence” on the Net. It's just been donated piecemeal into a myriad of walled gardens. On one level, blogging is a natural reaction to this phenomenon: I want to own my own comments and thoughts, rather than simply offer them as fertilizer for someone else's walled garden.
There's no problem with Internet sites that provide tools and space for users to host their contributed content. It may be easier for many to let Craig's List, Amazon, eBay, Trip Advisor, Epinions and others host the content users would like to contribute to the infosphere. But increasingly, with the advent of blogs and citizen's media, users do have a place to host their content. They've already realized the value about owning and controlling their own commentary on the world via blogs, but edgeio highlights the potential for users to become “holistic” in their publishing and content management. Why not host your restaurant reviews, your classified ads, your resume, your game walk-throughs on your terms. You control it, you own it. It's yours to begin with, so why not?
Indices, metadata and navigational information belong in the center. Content, however, optimally exists at the edge. This design pattern is pervasive on the Internet – Google is a prime example. Google aggregates metadata about billions of web pages that are out there: index at the center, content at the edge. Google doesn't maintain a “walled garden” of content that its index provides access to. It simply provides indirection – links to the content, wherever it lives.
That's not the case with craigslist, though, or any number of other destination sites. Craigslist aggregates metadata for classified ads, but only for the content it controls. Why? Fodor's provides an easy search facility for finding user reviews on destinations, but only for reviews that it hosts and controls. Why?
There are practical reasons, to be sure. In the case of craigslist, it's just easier to get things off the ground if you provide a “one stop shopping” experience – type in your classifed ad here, and you're ready to go. There's self-interest at work as well; content hosting builds a tighter relationship with users that can be monetized. Those are good reasons if you are a walled garden builder. If you are a user, though, these reasons are increasingly less important, as tools for hosting and managing one's own content become more refined and accessible, and aggregating services like edgeio emerge.
Edgeio follows the Google pattern – metadata at the center, content at the edge. Craigslist follows the eBay pattern – everything within the garden walls. It's certainly a challenge for edgeio and other like-minded services (the underlying thesis behind structured blogging and microformats is essentially the same) to get over the initial adoption threshold, but once up and going, this model performs much better than the walled garden approach. Maybe not for the walled garden, but for the user who powering Web 2.0 and beyond. Us, in other words.