Digital Trends

Me.dium

October 7th, 2007 | by Ryan Williams

Me.dium Lets You Surf with Your Friends

Me.dium, based in Colorado, first stepped onto the scene late last year and officially launched in February. Such has been the intensity of web startup activity, with dozens of new services every week. With a new round of product updates — including Internet Explorer support and a widget you can put on your own site or blog — and increased exposure in tech blogs and various download hubs, Me.dium has been gaining momentum.

Me.dium is a browser add-on (supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Flock) that visualizes the activity surrounding the web page you’re viewing. Social browsing is the simplest way to think about it. It sits in your browser sidebar, displaying a “map” of nodes representing other web pages that the service is recommending to you based on your current location, along with the people that are viewing that page. As you browse around the web, you’ll see your little orange person icon move around the map while other users are floating around you. Each page you visit generates a new map of recommendations.

No social web service would be complete without being able to make friends. On Me.dium, you can invite your friends to join you or become friends with the people you discover in your map. Your friends are displayed in their own tab within the sidebar and are represented with a different color icon than strangers in your map. In addition to showing the map of users and friends, Me.dium also features an Instant Messaging component that allows you to chat with the users or friends within your current map, either directly or as a group chat. The messaging component is actually a nice differentiator between Me.dium and another popular social browsing service, StumbleUpon.

Depending on how social you feel or where you happen to be browsing, you can easily set your level of visibility within the map to be visible to everyone, just your friends, or no one at all. It’s also dead simple to shut Me.dium down, either by closing the sidebar or clicking the button it places in your browser toolbar.

This type of service brings up an important issue: privacy. Me.dium does a nice job of highlighting its privacy policy prominently on their site, and the FAQs cover these issues well. In short, they do collect the web page URLs you visit in order to compute the recommended pages. The service automatically disables on any secure site, and all communication between your browser and the Me.dium servers is done securely. You can request to have your information deleted with an e-mail, and they state that the user owns all of the data. Me.dium makes privacy and security a priority, as they should, but be sure to read through the policies carefully and know exactly what you’re giving to them before jumping in.

There are a couple specific uses that Me.dium advertises itself as being a good tool for. The first is task-based; it can help you complete a specific project (such as researching a trip), either with a friend or with similar people in the community, and allows you to chat with the other users when you’re on the same or similar sites. The other is discovery; when observing the behavior of the crowds, you can come across something new and interesting.

Hello? Anyone Out There?

After using the service for about a week, we have found it to be weak for the latter use (discovery). Perhaps it’s because of Me.dium’s youth, but rarely did we find anything related or interesting in the recommendation map. There were no “crowds”; usually, there was only one user per page. Occasionally, we noticed two users on a page, but the one time we saw more than two, it was a “get rich quick” system. Spam already? Digg, del.icio.us, or StumbleUpon offer a much better experience for discovery. If you can get enough friends to use it, then real-time discovery of interesting things among your friends would be fun.

However, we can see good uses for the task-based approach, surfing the web with friends or colleagues looking for something specific. Being able to say, “Hey, check this out, come over here” is common at the workplace, and common among social bookmarking sites when seeing what your friends have bookmarked, but Me.dium allows this to happen in real time, across the internet.

Conclusion

We enjoyed using Me.dium and will definitely keep it installed. It won’t be an always-on component of our web use, but the visual aspect keeps drawing us back. Me.dium could be a useful tool for when you research tasks and work with people to find something. It’s not a Digg or StumbleUpon killer yet, but the real-time aspect brings a nice dimension to the social web and will keep it growing for the foreseeable future.



Pros:

• Fun, impressive visualization of movement around the web
• Messaging allows real-time discussion within the context of the page you’re viewing with others
• Collaboration while surfing with a purpose is useful


Cons:

• Discovery is weak
• No noticeable crowds
• Most nodes on the map weren’t related or interesting
• Some would view as intrusive