Local Tech Start-up to Change the Way You Surf

Me.dium Launches Private Beta

By Mark Phillips, 11-07-06

A few weeks ago, a local Web 2.0 startup called Me.dium quietly began sending out invitations. I scored one after running into Kimbal Musk and his wife while standing in line to see Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians at the Boulder Theater. The line was too long and a drink at Trilogy was more promising than the opening band. I can't remember exactly how it came up-we spent most of our time discussing a recent installation Kimbal's wife Jen did at a Javits Center Wired event-but at some point Kimbal Blackberried an invitation to me and I started playing around with the tool a day or two later.

Me.dium is a plug-in for the Firefox Browser that enables "social browsing". It occupies a space on left side of my browser window, has a bulls-eye graphic in the top half, and a buddy list/chat window in the lower half. As I navigate around different sites (tonight I'm researching a road trip from Guatemala to Costa Rica), an algorithm at Me.dium HQ digs through the characteristics of those sites and puts related sites on the bulls-eye around me. If another Me.dium user happens to be on one of those sites in my bulls-eye, a small buddy icon (yellow for a friend, blue for a generic user) floats near the icon for the their site. From my perch on Couchsurfing.com, I can see that the Me.dium community has recently been to Orbitz, Boots n' All travel blog, Travelpod, and the ever-present Google icon. I can visit other sites on my bulls-eye or I can chat with anyone in my bulls-eye (friend or not) in the chat box. Or I can click on a friend in my buddy list and chat. Tonight I showed a buddy several helpful travel sites, bragged about a surfing camp I uncovered, and discussed a possible detour through Antigua.

"It's not about recommendations or a new way to chat, though," claims Me.dium co-founder David Mandell. "It's about illuminating people and activity in a way that affects behavior." How so? Mandell compares Me.dium use to walking down a street, say West Pearl, in search of a dinner. "From 11th Street I can see probably ten different options. As I walk, I might see one restaurant that's nearly empty while another, two doors down, has a line around the corner. I probably here music coming from another. As I take in other people's behavior, it affects mine, and that's what Me.dium does. By seeing what other people around you are doing, it gives you a range of options (or supplies a range of information) that mirrors the range you have in everyday life making everyday decisions."

As of last Friday, about 1000 users were affecting other people's activity and decisions. Given the heavy VC presence involved and ultra-bleeding edge characteristics of the private betateers, it's not surprising that there were quite a few more people having lunch at coloradostartups.com and picking over the clearance rack at the Me.dium forum page. That will change. As more people join, Me.dium captures their activity and plugs it into the system getting ever-more granular as it goes.

Not surprisingly, the number of people joining/using is a major source of anxiety for Mandell and the rest of the Me.dium team. "Every day I worry about two things," said Mandell, "that not enough people will use it and that too many people will use it." The first fear seems based in the fact that many people that I talk to are worried about privacy issues. "I don't necessarily want people seeing where I'm going," protested my friend Eric. He thinks of his web-time the way he thinks of home-time, which is different from thinking about web-time like going-out time. Mandell counters that all of this information is collected by advertisers anyway; Me.dium simply puts that information to use for users. More importantly, Me.dium users control what is seen (a privacy screen can be thrown up at any time) and who sees it (users can be visible to all, visible to none, or visible only to friends).

The second fear is based on the enormous processing required to make Me.dium work. "It's not hard to see how this could go viral quickly," wrote blogger Bruce MacVarish last week. While this is a dream for most web entrepreneurs, it could be disastrous for Me.dium. Imagine Me.dium as a new Dewey Decimal system for the web. Every book (page) must be read, indexed, and filed. Too many books at once would stretch the system and affect performance.

Back in August, Brad Feld (Me.dium and New West investor) wrote about the untapped value of user-generated content and about the challenge of getting enough of it. Many have tried to leverage the wisdom of crowds, but, according to Mandell, they're always site specific and too user-intensive. Blogs and filters and tagging and recommendations all seem to require a level of effort such that only the most dedicated (or boring!) users contribute content. Medium seems to answer that challenge by turning every user into a passive content generator. The Machine (I'm sure the Me.dium team has a nickname for it. What could it be? MD? Doc? Bugs? Or is bugs bad juju for a software company?) crunches all of that passively-generated content and spits out logical relationships for the peripheral enjoyment of each user. "Will it be valuable to the masses?," asks beta tester Devin Reams, "That's not clear yet. What's clear is this is a unique approach to social browsing and I'm interested to see what happens with it." The startup has lots of firepower (Musk has a number of successful tech launches behind him and Feld is just one of the VCs betting on Me.dium's success) behind it and there's increasing buzz about the service around the blogosphere, so I'm sure their prospects are good. For the time being, focus will be on fielding suggestions from an enthusiastic (and demanding!) beta group and on ensuring that the machine behind the scenes can stay on top of the growth.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.