14 DAY TRIAL // If you think that you have seen all that add-ins for Internet Explorer 7 have to offer, you'd better think again. You haven't seen anything yet. Me.dium is an add-in designed to reveal the world of people and activity behind the browser. In this context, Me.dium is a cross-browser and cross-platform solution that currently delivers support for Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0 and, as of MIX07 for Internet Explorer 7 and both Macs and PCs.
Me.dium is in beta stage and access to testing the current milestone is limited and by invitation only. Still, users of Firefox 1.5, 2.0 and IE7 can head over here and apply for participation in the beta product.
"While at first blush it might look like an instant messaging competitor, Me.dium's aim is different: it's designed to create connections between people viewing the same web site and uses collaborative filtering to suggest similar sites that might be of interest to its users. Their database collects URLs you've visited and chosen to share, your most recently visited web pages, your friends list and any other profile information you choose to share in order to run this data through their algorithm and generate a list of other sites relevant to one you're currently visiting, and consequently of potential interest to you," revealed Nick White, Microsoft Product Manager.
"Me.dium records your attention stream for use in creating the space of correlated users and websites. This stream includes all of the websites that you share with Me.dium. Me.dium does not review or record the content of the websites. Instead, we record that you navigated from one site to another and compare that activity to other users. This correlation is strengthened as more users perform the same action. We store four things: web-page (URL) visits you choose to share with us, your most recently visited web-pages, your list of friends, and any profile information you choose to share with us," reads a fragment of the Me.dium FAQ.
Me.dium informed that all the browser communications are encrypted with 128-bit SSL and stored on the company's secure data centers. The core idea behind this add-in is to make users that access an online location an integer part of the community of visitors. You will no longer be a single entity on a website but a piece of a populated online world with which Me.dium will allow you to interact and connect.