Me.dium: making the web a shared community experience
By DiGiTAL
You’re walking down a busy street and you come across a group of people huddled around a shop window. If you’re like most people, you’d want to find out what’s going on. A new web site, Me.dium.com, is trying to bring the same concept to the Internet.
Come gather round…
Me.dium.com was recently publicly launched at the Demo 07 conference in California, which touts itself as being the “launch pad for emerging technology”.
What Me.dium.com does is to track your web browsing habits and shows you the sites that are being visited by other Me.dium.com users with similar web usage patterns to yours.
Other users and the sites they are visiting appear as icons in a sidebar next to your browser (see above). If you come across something interesting, you click on the web site’s icon, and Me.dium.com takes your web browser to that site.
Yes, this means that what you’re doing on the Internet is being tracked, and shown to other people, but you can control how much information is revealed about you, and to whom. User name and password information is not captured by Me.dium.com, so you don’t need to worry about people following you into your bank or email account.
What’s very interesting about this approach is that because it is based on the real-time web browsing patterns of real people, it would be much harder for web site owners to seed or manipulate, than it is for other content discovery sites like Netscape or Digg.
So far Me.dium has received a good response from early users. For example Jerry Paffendorf, says:
“I don’t say it lightly, but I think my web browsing experience may have permanently changed…it’s giving me the sense that the web is finally alive with people.”
While Liz Gannes says:
“The most compelling part of Me.dium is social. It’s really fun to follow your friends around; for instance, this morning as I’ve been writing, a crowd gathered around a local paper’s story about Me.dium. I can click over to find out what the hubbub is all about. You can see how this would get a lot more fun with more people on it.”
Me.dium.com is currently in limited public beat and works only with open-source browsers Firefox and Flock.
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