Edgio Bites the Dust

As we told you the day it launched, Edgio never had a chance. In any case, the best product was and always will be TechCrunch itself. RIP Edgio, we hardly knew ye (thank god).

Et Tu, TechCrunch — Squidoo

TechCrunch has finally grown a pair and thrown a major web 2.0 property under the bus. In the process he has set up a delicious meta-bash of his own currently foundering project.

In today's post, entitled "Squidoo: Seth Godin's Purple Albatross", Mr. Arrington states the obvious that we mentioned weeks ago– Squidoo's traffic is flat, its concept is flawed, and its future is dim. Perhaps TechCrunch has been feeling the heat of being too positive on Web 2.0 (which as a general concept has petered out in a major way as 2006 marches on), and went for the easiest high-profile target.

But in doing so, he sets himself up for a righteous slap back which Godin probably does not have the balls to deliver except in a roundabout, professional marketer way. The simple fact of the matter is that Edgeio has similar problems– problematic concept, parabolic traffic, sub-par execution etc. The biggest difference between Edgeio and Squidoo is that Squidoo executes its shaky concept in a very mediocre way, while Edgeio executes its far better concept poorly.

While TechCrunch postulates that Godin will lose his hard-earned credibility, this goes double for TechCrunch. How can you critique other people's ideas when your own is gasping for air? How can you claim mental ownership of Web 2.0 ideas when on the execution side, you can clearly be shown to not have a handle on things? As a former (current?) VC, Arrington knows you're only as good as your last deal… perhaps TechCrunch (and its newfound ability to bash as well as praise) is the true business, but co-ownership of Edgeio is an albatross of a different color.

Edgeio and Squidoo Trends: Not So Good

These sites should be growing much faster if they are to gain traction. Squidoo's numbers are actually starting to improve from its previous downcycle, but the overall trend looks more parabolic then something in its space should.

Mashable Hypes Edgeio

As we mention below, people are afraid to call a spade a spade in the Edgeio debacle because of the perceived power of its creator, who is also the TechCruncher. Case in point: Pete Cashmore of Mashable* (don’t forget the asterisk) has this to say recently:

Mike Arrington just gave me a heads up on Edgeio’s new feature release, slated for later today. As promised, Edgeio is adding the ability to create listings directly on the site – no blog required. What’s more, this feature acts as a kind of mini-blog, along with its own feed.

He then goes into a light critique of the business model, but never once mentions actually trying a search on the site, or the problem that Edgeio is basically unusable and they’ve probably sold about 50 things so far.

Edgeio = Crappio

No one and I mean no one wants to bash Edgeio because the founder is the TechCrunch dude. But have you tried using the site? Wow is it awful. It sounded like a bad idea to begin with, but you kind of thought the execution might be there given that the main guy behind it is able to write really good-looking blog posts about web 2.0 ‘companies’.

First of all, there are no good listings. Which is pretty much a dealbreaker when you’re trying to sell people things. A search for ‘powerbook‘ yields 3 results. One is total garbage, the other two are 22 and 28 days old. Ebay has something like 2600, and my local craig’s list has about 60 in the past day or two.

Secondly, almost all of the listings seem to be irrelevant or spam. For example, one of the top tags is “New York City”. OK, you think, I like New York City let’s see what’s in that sucker. Well, you get 3 listings for Apartments listed in the past 4 days, with prices of $21,000,000, $30,000,000 and $25,900,000. Yeah, those ought to sell on Edgio in a day or two.

Thirdly, even if all the listings are crap, the very least the site could have is decent UI. But it doesn’t. Search is pretty much the only way to use the sucker, all the “top tags” “popular items” etc. are meaningless when you’re talking about buying real things. For example, here’s one of the “hot items”. What the hell is that? Tagging and folksonomy are great for a lot of sites, but so far Edgeio just shows how bad it is to rely on that when you’re trying to actually sell things and make something usable. And there’s shit everywhere, it’s impossible to know where to go and how to find things, other then searching.

Lastly, the geocode or localization barely works. Or, it does, kind of, but the results it brings back are just like the rest of the site, which is to say irrelevant. The slider looks nice, though. Good localization might be a little important when you’re hyped as an ebay or craig’s list killer.

Now to be fair, and I usually am not, the thing may have potential, if they completely scrap 80% of what they’re doing and make a usable site with limited but actual listings. But it’s really, really hard to see them doing anything decent if this is the best they can do up to this point, given that probably everyone with a blog who’s paying attention has heard of Edgeio and perhaps been there. They may not know how to pronounce it, or give a shit about “the edge” and other buzzwords, but they’ve seen it (check out the Alexaholic graph) and by and large aren’t coming back for more or telling their friends.

Something to think about when assessing the acumen of TechCrunch next time a site is hyped as ‘indispensible’ or killer.