Postcards from the Edgeio

I went to check out Edgeio, and the first thing that jumped out at me is what may be the dumbest tagline ever — “Listings from the edge” — this immediately made me think of Postcards from the Edge, the autobiographical novel by actress Carrie Fisher, which was made into an all-star film.

My next thought was — this is a service that is openly hostile to non-geeks — it’s name, it’s tagline. Forget the tiny awareness statistics for RSS. What percentage of the US online population is familiar with the Web 2.0 concept of the “edge”? Less than 0.001%?

And this is how it’s being branded? This has to be a case study in how to brand your technology product in a way that ensures mainstream users will not adopt it.

I won’t repeat my previous critique of Edgeio, but let me just dig into the following explanation on Edgeio for how to publish listings:

edgeio constantly monitors RSS enabled websites – today we are monitoring more than 25 million sites! Any item tagged “listing” and included in an RSS feed will be published on the edgeio website and through the edgeio network.

So I’m an Ebay power seller (or user of Craigslist) who comes to check out Edgeio, and my first question is, uh, “what’s RSS”?

I nominate Edgeio as the poster child for Web 2.0’s utter failure to understand and design applications for AVERAGE PEOPLE.

Branding professionals are having their own difficult rendezvous with the new media world (in which everyone has equal access to the tools of branding), but unlike your average Ajax developer, at least they have a clue about pop cultural reference points and how to connect with consumers.