Me.dium is the online medium, or hopes to be that someday very soon. This social browsing company has developed a novel solution that it says is better than chat, beyond your usual news feeds, and a first-ever way to surf together with friends, share pictures and videos, and experience the interaction one is used to in the real world, in the online world for the first time. Since its launch less than a year ago, it has attracted more than 2 million users and is pumping more than 20 million URLs through its system every day.

Founded in 2006, Me.dium set out to create a new kind of social browsing experience.

According to David Mandell, Founder and Vice President, “We started this company because of the dilemma in the real world vs. the online world. In the real world, the people and activity around you constantly affect your behaviors and decisions. Let’s say you walk down the street looking for restaurants, you might see one that is empty, one with friends in it, one full of music, etc. In this way, you’re getting the contextual and social value of your environment and it affects your decisions. Online you are completely alone. You can be going to the same web sites as your friends, but you have no way to get the social and contextual value that you do in the real world. Our goal is create a solution that reveals those people to you in a social browsing experience and changes how you think about finding and interacting with both people and information online.”

Mandell says Me.dium is building what he calls a ‘real-time index layer’ over the web and creating a shared world. Explains Mandell, “So wherever you are online, you are getting information based on the real time activity of people around you, whether it’s browsing information about what others are browsing, or where your friends are surfing, and more. This capability did not exist before Me.dium.”

While the solution was initially developed within the Mozilla-based browser, Firefox, it was quickly migrated to the Microsoft® Internet Explorer® to establish credibility, distribution, and mass-market appeal. Says Mandell, “That migration was the goal from the start. We took something developed on another platform and were able to flip it into the Microsoft Internet Explorer platform quickly and easily because Microsoft was able to get us access to the right people at the right time.” While Mandell says the solution was available before its formal launch in August of 2007, as far as the company was concerned, “We couldn’t consider it a true public launch until we could support Internet Explorer.”

Me.dium makes it very clear why it chose Microsoft technologies, says Mandell, “We chose to offer an add-on for Internet Explorer because Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser on the planet.”

Mandell also says that getting access to the right people within Microsoft was key for the company from a strategic and tactical perspective, and having access to the user base was critical as well. “By working with EBT and technical teams within Microsoft, we could quickly code something on the Internet Explorer platform. And that gave us access to 80 to 90 percent of the users in the world that use Explorer as opposed to Firefox. If we had attempted this without Microsoft, it would have taken 10 times longer and in the startup world — time is everything.”

Says Mandell, “We were amazed at the amount of attention and insight we were able to get as a result of working with the Emerging Business Team. They kept us connected with the right people at Microsoft who helped us increase our development speed and reach an entirely larger market than we could have on our own.”

Me.dium has created a browser add-on that shows you where your friends are online right now and makes it easy to share the experience. For instance, you can share a funny YouTube video, gossip about last night’s photos on Facebook, or even research stuff together for class. Me.dium allows you to effortlessly share by linking your friends to exactly what you’re seeing. Every time you send a friend a chat in Me.dium, your location online automatically comes along with it. Me.dium combines the functionality of chat with the ability to hang out together online in real time. So, when you communicate using Me.dium, your friends can see exactly what web page, picture, or video you’re talking about.

In this way, Me.dium makes your online world feel more like the real world by helping you create shared experiences between you and your friends.

Creating Shared Experiences

The company believes that its solution is destined to change the way people interact, or the way people think about being online. Explains Mandell, “You can now start to think of being online as an environment, as opposed to being just a web page.”

Since launching its product, it has attracted more than 1 million users. Its initial target audience is the 18- to 24-year-old college market — the people who live and breathe on text messaging, and on Facebook, and other social networking sites — although Me.dium sees tremendous application for corporate applications as well. The company’s business model focuses on aggregating several layers of data that users are sharing with Me.dium.

Explains Mandell, “We all know how valuable activity data is, so why don’t we ask the consumer if they want to share it, and give them a reason to share it with us. We think of your activity as your asset. And you as a consumer, should be able to control who you share it with, when, and where. And we give you value to do so, and if it’s not enough, then you don’t have to use it. By giving users value, we’re aggregating tremendous amounts of real-time activity data. This is what is missing right now from the online experience, and we’ve built an infrastructure based on Microsoft technologies that allows us to leverage this information on three levels.”

First, says Mandell, the company gives users value for sharing information in the form of incentives or other benefits. At the second level is the impact this real time information will have on search. While Google and other search vehicles provide data that is very broad and indexed really well for specific things, you don’t get an understanding of what is going on right now — the real-time layer. And third is contextual advertising enabled by understanding what a person’s actual task is while online.

Explains Mandell, “Based on the real-time layer we are creating, we start to see patterns, and that data is very contextual, very specific, and very targeted. So our ad-based business model goes way beyond the cookie-based advertising system.”

Building the Right Foundation With IE

Me.dium uses the Internet Explorer platform to enable its users to surf the Internet with each other, creating a shared experience around related pages and helping people find information together. In particular, the Me.dium Internet Explorer add-on uses the Internet Explorer 7 COM interfaces, the Windows ® XP API, and Windows Installer. The company says that development was done using Windows Visual Studio® 2005 and Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset was used to create the Installer.

Mandell says, “While the Internet Explorer has been fundamental to Me.dium’s browser-based product, it is the Windows API that enables the Me.dium add-on to achieve the level of integration required to prove the Me.dium experience. The Me.dium add-on hooks and manipulates the IE command bar in order to provide sensor status indication, dynamic tool tips, and a drop-down menu from the Me.dium command bar button. The add-on also uses COM to enable inter-thread and inter-process communication, allowing a continuous experience of the Me.dium shared world even as the user switches between tabs or browser windows.”

As part of the Microsoft Start-up Accelerator Program, Me.dium has benefited from broad access to technology. Just two weeks before Internet Explorer 8.0 was launched in the developer community, Me.dium was asked if they could build something “cool” for the launch. Mandell says they worked for two weeks to build the applications that supported the value proposition on the Internet Explorer side and built two applications. One was a web discovery tool that uses its real-time add-on to provide a view into pages around you that have web slices so you can discover them without actually being on the pages, and navigate to them. The second product was an activity menu. With the Me.dium social discovery activity you can click the page or highlight text or a hyperlink, and Me.dium will show you what and who else is around that link based on the actual activity of the crowds.

Joshua Allen, Senior Technical Evangelist for Internet Explorer, says Me.dium supported web slices and activities right out of the gate with IE 8.0 beta 1.0, what he refers to as a “significant step beyond just porting to IE. This is pretty innovative.”

Internet Explorer 8 takes the web experience beyond the page. It introduces a new way to seamlessly experience the best of the web whether you are a web developer writing to standards or a user discovering a new online service. Me.dium created products for two new IE features, Web Activities and WebSlices. Allen says these features in IE 8.0 allow users to extend the browser using pure web standards without having to write C++ code. Says Allen, “You can right click anywhere in a web page and see who is browsing that page with Me.dium.”

WebSlices is a new feature for websites that enables users to subscribe to content directly within a web page. WebSlices behave just like feeds in that users can subscribe to them and receive update notifications when the content changes. Says Allen, “Me.dium implemented a WebSlice and went a step further. If you have Me.dium installed and you land on pages with WebSlices, it will give you additional information about other WebSlices that might exist around you. It even does this with FireFox, so we might get some users interested in trying out IE.”

Says Allen, “The whole social browsing area is a very cool scenario and we need startups that can be nimble and try out new things, so it’s exciting to see companies like Me.dium depending on Microsoft technologies.”

Says Mandell, “Being part of the Explorer 8.0 launch was a huge, huge deal for us.”

The company doesn’t see itself as a traditional partnership story with Microsoft, but more of a story focused on Microsoft goals and user value. According to Mandell, “We’re enhancing the value of Microsoft products and creating completely new ways to interact online.”

From Social Browsing to Social Search

In addition to the innovative Social Toolbar that enables Social Browsing in real time, Me.dium is getting set to launch another great way to leverage the real time activity of the crowds: Social Search. Shortly, Me.dium’s Social Search product will be the first time that you will be able to leverage the actual activity of crowds to get relevant search-based information: Crowd-Powered search.

Me.dium’s Social Search delivers results based completely on the actual activity of real people, it lets you see what other people have actually been looking at in relation to your search term. More than just what other people are searching, you’ll see what they are actually surfing!

Instead of relying on automated computer programs like spiders to crawl the Web and bring back information that may or may not be relevant, Me.dium’s Shared World technology platform lets you, the user, act as a web crawler, without having to do anything differently. Me.dium’s users show us what’s “hot” or most active on the Web right now. As a result, when you enter a search term, the Me.dium Search results are sorted and presented based on what people have actually been looking at in relation to your search term – in essence, where the crowds are online and what they’ve found relevant and useful.

Currently in Alpha phase, Social Search is a brand new, entirely different way to think about search and Me.dium looks forward to testing how it impacts how people think about finding information together.

Download Me.dium’s success story in PDF format.