Is Edgeio an eBay slayer?

The thing that will prevent a lot of sellers from leaving something like eBay behind is the "oh my God" factor of finding out, through the auction format, that their book, which they would have parted for for a buck, is worth five hundred. If you go with a straight sales approach, you have to figure out somehow what all your junk is worth, and while some of us have the tools and net savvy to do just that, most will still prefer the easier method of eBay.

DNW

The interesting thing about Edgeio is actually not so much the fact that it is trying to make it easier for you to sell stuff by posting effectively on your own site - but that lots of other sites could then pull it in ie. eBay could easily read RSS feeds with 'listing' in them and then seamless integrate that with its own auction listings (economics need some thinking here obviously, but that's an aside as you could almost do it on advertising with enough traffic). In concept it actually becomes much more effective at allowing you to find that $500 buyer for your $1 book by offering it beyond 'just eBay'. Big risk for Edgeio here is that it championing the idea that users tag stuff on their own site - but if 'listing' XML tags are standardised then, by encouraging this, Edgeio is making it easier for competitors to read and they could be the masters of their own downfall as other RSS readers just pile in.

To me the more interesting idea is the application of this to business data - whether products, services, financials or management details - this is one element what our business www.marketclusters.com now does in pulling in RSS feeds from selected companies and repurposing them. It potentially disintermediates a lot of the high-priced data aggregators and gives a wider audience to the companies key information.