I just posted on the edgeio blog that the edgeio site has gone live tonight at midnight, Pacific time. Overall this is both scary and exhilarating. After 18 months since conceiving the idea, teaming up with Mike , Matt and Vidar, then involving Fred in front end design, we have opened the doors.

Om Malik was the first to post about it.

The last 2 weeks we had about 5000 people using edgeio with a password. As a result we have about 2000 listings from more than 150 cities. We made a conscious choice to NOT pre-populate edgeio with scraped data. edgeio is about self publishing and empowering the user to do more under their own control. Better to open with no data (we beat that hurdle ) than to open with data not intended for edgeio.

Anyway, the system is now live and we will get to see it in real use. Thats what we have all been working for.

A special thanks to Mike (who was great at focusing us on user-centric features), Matt (who drove the specs and managed the implementation), Vidar (who built the back end single handedly), Fred (who designed the edgeio look), and more recently to Eugene, Serge and Joseph who have been contracting on many specific features.

Also, Jeff Clavier (who has been a great advisor); Ron Conway (who led our angel financing) and the other investors who have shown confidence in us.

Now we get down to the hard work……

There has been a lot of coverage of edgeio recently. Here are some links:

Technorati:

Memeorandum:

Tailrank:

I’m at Mashup Camp. Tantek is moderating a session on microformats.

I just made an hcard. Here is is

Keith Teare

edgeio

44 James Avenue

Atherton, CA 94027

+1-650-331-1998

I have been gratified to see all the coverage about edgeio since I demo’d it last week at SDForum’s Search SIG, and Rob Hof’s first post. Everybody seems to like the concept. You can track the discussion here and here.

Mike posted on Techcrunch and on the edgeio blog.

For those who like to know the background, just a few pointers.

Philosophically: tagging – it seemed to me – was the thing that could enable RSS to be leveraged as an application layer enabler. Basically, the idea of RSS carrying a payload for an application. Using the “listing” tag to enable a decentralized listings marketplace was and is, in my view, only a start. It can enable users to use their blog for listings. In future I would expect many more applications to be built using various tags as their starting point (podcast and videocast and photocast seem obvious ones). Indeed if you combine the “listing” tag with the “services” tag and one of those today you would be creating a subset on edgeio focussed on podcasts, videocasts and photocasts.

The exciting thing for me is the idea that edge content and applications can enable each other. But additionally that the applications can be a vehicle for the distribution of that content. edgeio – the name – is the word edge with an I and an O. The I stands for “In” and the O for “Out”. We will have API’s for all edgeio content and allow both individuals and other applications to re-publish our data in new and unpredicatable ways. Want listings on your gadget blog, just call our API (we will have a widget for this) and you can have gadget specific listings on your gadget blog. And so on..

How it started: I first came up with the edgeio idea in late 2004, whilst working with the Real Time Web team at VeriSign, as an external consultant. Mike and I began working on it almost immediately and then added Vidar Hokstad (back end engineer) and Matt Kaufman (product manager) to the team in early 2005. Fred Olivera has done front end work since last October. His role is more or less complete now (great job on the design by the way).

I’m looking forward to seeing how all this plays out. Thanks for the – so far – gracious and positive reception.

Update:

Good discussion on Pete Cashmore’s Mashable post.

Phil Sim disagrees with Pete. Has some critical points.

Note:

At some point soon we will try and aggregate the critical remarks on the edgeio blog. We’re pretty heads down on getting edgeio launched so this may take a couple of weeks but rest assured we are reading all remarks and will both be thinking about them and learning from them.