Yesterday I got an email from Herb at Me.dium, it turns out we have a connection in common. Herb wanted to let me know about Me.dium’s new widget release. A few months ago I tried the widget in Firefox on a Mac and it was pretty unstable, thus I had it turned off. Herb’s note prompted me to try it again and lo and behold, it’s much better behaved and pretty interesting.
What is Me.dium? It’s a community browsing widget that associates users in real-time on a visual pane on the browser side panel. Practically, that means that as you browse, others who are browsing similar content show up on the panel, conversations can ensue, and recommendations about other interesting content can be shared. It’s pretty cool. The screenshot below shows a full Firefox window with Me.dium side panel active:
Since that’s a big screen shoved into a small area, I’ve captured some closeups as well. The image below shows the visual users panel (what you don’t see is that this is constantly moving and changing as your browsing proceeds and as associated users move from content area to content area.)
Concerned about privacy? I am to some extent, particularly when I access password protected content. Herb & Co. have thought this through and protect you automatically. See an example below when I visited my Google Webmaster Tools account:
Overall, I think this is a pretty cool tool. Now that it’s stable in my browser, I’ll try it for an extended period and report back anything I find interesting. I have to wonder if a Me.dium-vision ala Twittervision is in the works. I could imagine a virtual map of the web where bits and pieces move, grow, contract, connect, comment as the Me.dium community browses in real time. What value does this have? I don’t know, but it would be fascinating to watch!
Download the Me.dium widget and give it a whirl. Tweet
Thanks for the deeper look Mike. Yes, it’s has come a long ways.
We are working on some new visualizations. We also have a “What’s Hot” feature set that will be coming out this fall.
Technically, what you are calling the “widget” is our Me.dium Sidebar. The Medium Widget is a different product, one that bloggers like yourself can put on their page to show activity around their blog. check out http://yoherb.typepad.com if you are interested. If you have an account (as you do) you can go to “Manage My Widget” to create those.
Again, thanks for checking out Me.dium, and I’m anxious to hear how you like it after a while.
Sorry about the confusion in naming Herb, I’ll update the content (though the title is kind of stuck at this point.)
Will let you know about the sidebar. The blog widget I haven’t played with, but I’ll try to get a look at it in the next few days…
Keep up the good work!