Me.dium add-in for IE7 connects kindred spirits

I've played with Me.dium from time-to-time using Mozilla Firefox but my preferred browser is IE7 so I'm glad that the software is now available. Me.dium is an interesting approach that blends concepts related to presence, collective situational awareness and social networking. While the focus of the company is more on the consumer market, I can see applications for this technology for e-service, e-commerce and other customer-facing applications on corporate web sites. There are likely examples of how this type of visualization could be helpful for internal enterprise use as well but for now, a focus on consumer-centric solutions is probably a better path to follow.

At MIX07 this week I came across a cool new plug-in for IE7 called Me.dium that I thought you should know about.  It's currently a Beta release but works just fine for me on IE7.  While at first blush it might look like an instant messaging competitor, Me.dium's aim is different:  it's designed to create connections between people viewing the same web site and uses collaborative filtering to suggest similar sites that might be of interest to its users.  Their database collects URLs you've visited and chosen to share, your most recently visited web pages, your friends list and any other profile information you choose to share in order to run this data through their algorithm and generate a list of other sites relevant to one you're currently visiting, and consequently of potential interest to you.

Source: Windows Vista Team Blog : Me.dium add-in for IE7 connects kindred spirits

Comments

[David Mandell]

Mike,

Thanks for the great description. Me.dium often gets lumped into the "chat on a page" category and as you stated, we're really aiming much higher here.

I do need to point out that although Nick White described the IE version as a Beta, it is still very much an Alpha and not yet ready for pre-prime time. We're plugging away to get it out as soon as we can, but for now, Me.dium is still only Firefox or Flock. If anyone wants to try out the current version, they can click on the link below and let us know what they think.

http://me.dium.com/from/187ae/

Thanks again.