In-browser social network Me.dium is expanding its services Wednesday night with the launch of a new social search tool. It pulls in regular old Yahoo results as part of the company's freshly announced BOSS platform (see news story here), while combining them with social results from other Me.dium users.
Me.dium founder David Mandell is calling the new system "Crowd Rank" and says it's not about how content links with other content, but how it links up with other users who are visiting these sites. Based on the data from people with the Me.dium sidebar or toolbar installed, the engine will get its own community-specific results that Mandell thinks will be more valuable than something merely indexed by machines.
That's not to say it's completely nixing those machined results. The social layer comes secondary to the service's main search, which will simply pull up Yahoo results. The extra value here is in the Me.dium community metadata that's wrapped around each link. Included is rank, velocity (how fast it's moved up in the results), crowd level, the last time a Me.dium user visited the site, along with how long most are spending there. It will be getting this data from two sources, both the social sidebar as well as a toolbar, which is launching as part of the service. Privacy will be the same for both products--as you can turn off tracking of sites you're visiting with two clicks.
Users looking for deeper integration with their in-browser search will have to use the toolbar or sidebar for the time being. Mandell says an option to use it in the top corner of compatible browsers like Firefox should be coming in the near future.
Related: Wikia Search launches the hackable search engine
Medium's social search will surf regular Yahoo results, while letting you search based on Me.dium user results too.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Browser side-bar chat and friend app extraordinare Me.dium has just released a new version this afternoon. I met up with founder David Mandell at last week's Web 2.0 Expo to chat about the new functionality, which he says is a very early version of Me.dium's next big thing. This big thing is actually a small change--your friends and their presence in the app, which is now taking the focus.
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Me.dium.com)
Previously Me.dium's claim to fame was meeting random people at sites you visited. Now it's all about your friends and improving the ways you can interact with them. Mandell compared his app with world travel, and that coming to a new city with people you don't know isn't nearly as fun as interacting with those you know and trust.
The functionality in question is the outright removal of the "everyone" tab, which would let you see the entire world of activity for other Me.dium users, and limit it to just your friends. Mandell says the tab will be added later on down the line, but he wants people to start focusing on their friends list, and expanding the ways you'll be able to interact with them in real time or asynchronously.
Part of that expansion uses the Facebook API to let you share links. If you find something you're interested in you can simply drag it over to your list of Facebook friends and it will set up a Facebook share for them right away. When they get it, it's the entire piece of content with a small note that says you shared it via Me.dium, but doesn't require your recipient to sign up read what you've sent their way.
Maybe a more important new feature is the similar pages button that will pop up with a list of sites related to the one you're looking at. In my testing it didn't do a whole lot of good, like when it likened Webware to CNN.com, but the concept is insanely great if it lets you discover new sites in a similar fashion to that of StumbleUpon.
Also on the list of things that are new is a skinning tool that lets you retheme the side bar. Mandell says they'll be opening up a way for people to design their own themes, as well as provide a place to parse through them and track what's hot. Users of Twhirl and other AIR-based communication apps will feel right at home.
As I told Mandell last week, I'm not too keen on apps that take over a big chunk of your browser. With that said I think anyone who's used to the Flock browser will be the happiest to adopt since so much of the browser's social features hang out in the same general area.
Social Web surfing tool Me.dium is one of the first apps ready for Internet Explorer 8 beta, which Microsoft unveiled at Mix '08 in Las Vegas Wednesday.
The browser add-on enables users to chat with each other and see which Web pages they're visiting. This release takes advantage of new WebSlices and Activities features within IE 8.
With WebSlices, users can subscribe to dynamic updates of specific parts of Web pages they visit, with new content displaying within the Me.dium sidebar.
Activities capabilities enable users to bring up maps or Web searches of highlighted text on a page. The Discovery activity offers real-time content recommendations related to the pages users are browsing. The feature maps and ranks the popularity of users' ongoing activities.
Upon Microsoft's request, the Me.dium (more here) team reportedly built the tool for IE 8 within a week.
For the sake of security, Me.dium allows stealth settings so users can hide from each other, and it shuts off at bank sites.
Users testing IE 8 can download Me.dium here. Some rival social browsing tools, however, don't require installation.
The extension, also available for Firefox, added support for IE 7 in September.
Me.dium is ready for Internet Explorer 8.
(Credit: Me.dium)
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Me.dium)
RockMe. has got to the be the only five-day music festival where you won't pay for tickets. It is social-networking site Me.dium's attempt to rock your world, and the only thing you need to get in is your Web browser. (Of course, you still have to bring your own drinks.)
RockMe., which runs from September 18 through September 22, 2007, will feature bands, music video competitions, and the world's safest mosh pit--it's virtual. More important to Me.dium, the RockMe. festival will provide plenty of opportunities for band members and music lovers to swap fond memories of choice lyrics and drum solos using Me.dium's service.... Read More
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Me.dium)
Surfing the Web doesn't have to be a solitary experience, at least according to Me.dium, a browser add-on that uses real-time data to share information with your friends and the Me.dium community. Today, Me.dium added support for Internet Explorer 7, opening up the "social surfing" experience to a huge new audience.
In essence, Me.dium lets you share as much of your browsing information as you like with either a select set of friends, Me.dium users who are visiting a specific Web page, or the Me.dium community at large. The extension presents itself in a browser sidebar and displays your Me.dium universe, or "your online world." The map is based on your current Web location, your friends' current browsing spots, and your recent Web activity. ... Read More
Weezu is a downloadable chat app that runs as an extension in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Like some of the other chat apps we've covered lately, Weezu resides in a sidebar on your browser. It's a bit more graphical than some of the other extensions out there, and if you want something that's a little prettier than plain text, Weezu's for you.
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CNET Networks)
One of the things that attracted me to Weezu was its eccentric interface, which puts you in several different locals and is completely skinnable. My favorite is the sea floor--if you had kids they'll likely enjoy this. When you're not interested in chatting, Weezu can be hidden. Settings and messaging commands reside on your "command module," which also houses your user avatar and chat boxes. Other users show up as floating heads, clicking on them starts up a chat right away.
Weezu is an interesting chat service. It's really simple to use and can be turned on and off at any time, but it lacks some of the ease of entry I've seen with the no-download chat solutions. You still have to install something, which might keep the casual user from committing. There also are not a whole lot of people using the service right now, which isn't Weezu's fault, but rather the design of any of these browser chat services that spread users out across the entire Internet. Weezu has several language localizations, the English one can be found here.
Last time we covered services that required no install or downloads to get a chat going. Today we're looking at seven embeddable objects and extensions for your browser or Web site that give you some additional features over those services:
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CNET Networks)
- Weezu is a small extension for both Firefox and Internet Explorer that creates a cartoon-like chatting area on the bottom of your browser. Users get their own avatars, and the interface is completely skinnable. Like some of the services we covered in the first chat roundup, Weezu requires no registration to get going.
- Me.dium. This plug-in lets you chat with others at any Web site and follows you from site to site. Me.dium gives you a friends list, profiles, and forums. In case you're worried about privacy, Me.dium automatically turns itself off when you're visiting secure pages like banks or Web mail. See our previous coverage.
- Dai.sy is similar to Me.dium but with a file-sharing twist. You can chat on any site together, and swap files like documents or pictures. There's also a built-in blogging tool. Dai.sy works with Firefox and Flock and requires no sign-up.
- Chatsum shares features with Me.dium and Dai.sy, but is also at work on a widget to use in Mac OS X's Dashboard. Also neat are two different tabs, one for the site as a whole and one for whatever page you're on, which means you can visit individual stories or sections separately.
- Yakalike is a Firefox extension that feels similar to Yaplet's (see our coverage of Yaplet here). It also works with IM client Jabber, meaning you can continue to chat with others outside of your browser without installing another app.
- The Planet Minibox chat box can be inserted in most Web sites. Planet Minibox logs everyone's messages for the owner to keep track of. It also has some customization and skinning options, which means you can tailor it to match the look and feel of your site. See our hands-on review here.
- Yackpack. Interested in adding voice chat to your site? Yackpack is essentially a push-to-talk voice meeting service mixed with voice mail. You can embed it on your site or create your own and send others a link for them to join. It runs straight in your browser (Internet Explorer- and Firefox-friendly) and requires no install. Previous coverage of Yackpack here.
Me.dium browser sidebar.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Wait, we've heard this before, haven't we? MyBlogLog (recently acquired by Yahoo) shows you who is viewing a Web page when you visit it. It's a really interesting app, but can be quite creepy.
A similar idea: Me.dium, which is launching its new "semi-public beta" at Demo 07 (which means it's an open beta, but new signups could be shut down at any time). Like MyBlogLog, Me.dium shows you who else is on the site you're on. It also shows you where your friends are hanging out online. And it shows you where people go to from the site you are on at any moment. You can chat with people who are on the site you're on, too.
Me.dium is a browser plug-in, so it works on any site.
Me.dium has privacy controls: it's easy to make yourself invisible to other users, and by default it doesn't show your presence on banking sites or on secure connections.
The service has real potential to make browsing--right now a private experience--a social experience. Unfortunately, both how to take advantage of the concept of Me.dium. and the features on the service itself are non-obvious to the casual user. It's harder to get up to speed on the service than it should be. But Me.dium is doing something very interesting and powerful, and it's worth puzzling through the service to understand its potential.
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