“Being around people changes everything,” Me.dium Inc. CEO Kimbal Musk intoned several times during his six-minute presentation at this week’s DEMO show for emerging technologies. Me.dium tracks your Web browsing habits and reveals which sites are being visited at any given moment by people and friends with similar patterns. Those people and their sites appear as colored icons in a window that Me.dium puts on the side of a Web browsing session.
The point is to let you see when some of your friends or even a crowd of strangers are gathering on a site presumed to be of interest to you — the way an urban stroll might lead you to the curiosity-provoking sight of a line forming outside a nightclub. Click on a “crowded” Web site and Me.dium takes your Web browser there. You can chat about the site’s contents with other people — “this blog has it all wrong,” for example — or recommend something else — another way of mimicking interactions in the “real” world.
Read this AP article at Yahoo. Commentary from the Read/Write Web. Other notable online social tools / communities include del.icio.us, stumbleupon and digg.
