Feeding the Edge

Edge Feeders.

Sounds like a specific category of the animal food chain. I came across this concept through a blog entry written by Fred Wilson, a managing partner at Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures.

He talks about the value of the network and how consumers want to create content on their own terms (think MySpace and YouTube) and want to be able to distribute that content on the edge. Content on the edge is not contained by a site/operator, like listings on a real estate site or editorials. It's the stuff that's widely and easily distributed by its creators. Enablers of the edge are the Edge Feeders who basically provide a platform for this content to be distributed.

The example he uses is Flickr. Flickr allows you to put all of your photos there and from there, you can post it to your blog, a family website, an Evite, et al. You get the point. It feeds all of your channels on the web. The value of this application is the ability to aggregate an enormous amount of edge content, organize it, and distribute it.

So what does this mean if you're not an Edge Feeder? I believe that site operators need to think hard about how to take advantage of facilitating the feeding of the edge. Giving control to the consumer is good and if you are in some way relying on user generated content, you will figure out a way to make it damn easy for users to feed their content into your site (i.e. click on a button and you have a direct feed from Flickr).

As evidenced by Flickr and Delicious, containing content creation is a thing of the past and feeding the edge is the future.

Fred's blog entry on Edge Feeders.