* Online presence with Me.dium
Online presence has become a big deal. The idea of knowing the status of one or more people who are online and important to you for whatever reason is starting to change the way we think about a whole range of issues from business relationships through to our love lives.
To know that your child is “contactable” at a moment’s notice and be able to send them crucial information such as “Daddy loves you” is a unique product of the meshing of a range of technologies not possible until the 21st century.
The less intimate side of that remote touch is knowing what your tribe is doing (social networking) or what kindred spirits are up to (perhaps we should call this community networking?).
Today I have a new service for you that addresses both of these issues but in the context of where you are in the Web: The service is called Me.dium.com (a splendid name) that shows you what your friends in particular and people in general (that is, other anonymous me.dium.com subscribers) are up to.
Me.dium lives in the Firefox sidebar (support for Internet Explorer is planned) and displays at the top of the sidebar a map that represents other users on pages related to the page you are on. These users are marked with icons for you, your friends, and “users” (other anonymous Me.dium users) as appropriate and hovering over the icons reveals what Web pages the users are currently looking at.
Below the map is an area with two tabs. The first is the “Live” tab that provides chat facilities so you can interact with other people shown in the map. The second is the “Friends” tab that allows you to chat either individually or as a group with people you know.
You can find explanations of how Me.dium works and what features are available in their FAQ.
Your privacy when you are viewing SLL protected sites is assured but non-SSL sites can be seen by others and reveal otherwise hidden content unless you specifically disable Me.dium when you are entering private but otherwise unprotected content.
I’ve been using Me.dium for a few days and I find what others are looking to be pretty interesting (just what I need, yet another online time sink!).
The whole idea of Me.dium is very interesting and worth taking a closer look at – it could have some interesting enterprise uses.
If you want to get access, just drop a note to webapps@gibbs.com with the subject “medium” and I’ll send you an invite. The service is currently free.
