The Last Podcast Opinionated Web 2.0 News and Commentary

Edgeio Shutting Down

Mike Arrington just announced that Edgeio, the blog classifieds company nobody ever used, or had any use for, or ever returned any relevant results, has shut down for good. There is no other news about this, as Keith Teare, the CEO, has not updated his blog since September 6th.

I admit that I never thought much of Edgeio’s business idea and I was always surprised that Mike Arrington would be the co-founder of a company that clearly didn’t solve a problem and was never going to be able to compete with the ebays, craigslists, and amazons of this world.

From Mike’s announcement:

The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.

The development was actually anything but complete. Instead,from the beginning, the search on Edgeio hardly returned any useful results (and in the early days, most of the results were spam anyway). Just look at this search for a ‘bike’ in Portland, OR – the bike capital of the US. The result: a DVD about ‘Wild Bikes’ on Amazon – not exactly local content.

Good thing everybody got out in time and ‘only’ $5.000.000 were wasted on this.

Good luck to everybody on the team there with finding a new job!

[...] they had the right tags — and then aggregated at Edgeio’s site. But like Frederic at The Last Podcast, I never found much of value there, likely because not enough people decided to get on board and [...]

OPEN LETTER TO EDGEIO INVESTORS

Dear EDGEIO investors…

I can understand the fact that you have spent a lot of money funding a great software and now you’d like to have at least some money back. But I believe the auction isn’t the best move for edgeio success. This is just my opinion, but I hope you consider at least thinking about “why not?”…

Instead of doing an auction and practically killing what could be a successful classified advertising platform (there are no bids until now, and the majority of people think that the price isn’t going to be higher than 50-60k)… you could do a very important move for the web2.0 history: release EDGEIO under the *new* FSF GNU Affero GPLv3 license – please read that license.

Why? In short because this license extends the rights and freedom of the “normal” gpl to remote web users, which means that if anyone improves Edgeio and makes it available online, they should provide a way (e.g. a direct link) to the new source code, thus generating a positive improvement cycle on web applications (just like gplv2 did for desktop applications years ago).

That’s amazing now, because as you might know, successful free softwares are mostly “generic” platforms serving different markets (openoffice, firefox, mysql, pidgin, gimp…), and Edgeio has yet no parallel in the free software world (just a matter of time tough). I could go on arguing about the infinite possibilities of improvements and uses for Edgeio around the world, but I think you have a lot of ideas you’d like to see implemented… I’m sorry to say that the auction is just going to kill all of them.

The combination Free Software + Web Applications could lead Edgeio to a renaissance in the hands of passionate developers willing to improve the system, and would enable current users to stick with their current system (maybe ask for donations – build a foundation like mozilla does) and prevent advertisers from running away before the auction finishes. Along with this changes, the need to provide support and related services will come (if still your interest or interest of your past employees) or – at least – you’ll just get some free publicity (which will probably worth more than $250,000) and a very good image around the world for your future startups.

Well, at this point I can imagine you can’t cancel the auction. So I’ll propose something to you: if the auction doesn’t reach the reserve price, make a public call asking people to donate something (probably current users will donate something), until the donations reach $200,000 and compromise to release the application under Affero GPLv3. You get your money, everybody else benefits too. You know that if the auction fails… you’ll probably won’t get $200,000. About the servers and other “physical goods”? Easy, for every $10 donated, the donor gets one numbered raffle “ticket”. The winning tickets split the prize…

Make History, Make Good, not money.
I hope you investors think about it seriously…

Best Regards,
Giovani Spagnolo

Support this letter at:
http://webyes.com.br/2007/12/13/open-letter-to-edgeio-investors/