Shiny Review: Me.dium social networking browser add-on

We love StumbleUpon around here, both for finding exciting new sites and for seeing how many people love us enough to Stumble pages around here. So I pricked my ears up at the mention of a new method of finding other sites and drawing new readers to Shiny Shiny.

I ended up quite disappointed, however, when I discovered that Me.dium, despite its flash looks, doesn't really do anything new, useful or interesting. You install the add-on for Firefox or IE, then log in and go browsing as normal. Me.dium registers where you are and gives you a little map of other relevant sites in your sidebar. These you can narrow down into specific fields by using category tabs such as technology, sport or news. Then there's the social element.

You get two ways of communicating with fellow browsers. You can either leave a general public message on the "talk" board that opens up at the bottom of the sidebar - the only option if you have no "friends" - or you can leave a private message for your friends. Should you move from one category to another, open chats will go with you, but other general talk on the board will change to reflect the area you're in.

However, I can't really see this being enormously useful. Navigating to Shiny Shiny I was presented with recommendations for Valleywag, Engadget and The Register, because these were the most popular. The problem is, these are hardly tiny sites that are under the average blog reader's radar. Surely if new content and digging into unexplored areas of the Internet appeals, then what you want is a recommendation system which gives you some weirder, more random options, rather than a list of sites you've probably already heard of and visit on a regular basis. Knowing that other people also visit them a lot isn't that useful to anyone except their marketing people.

I moved through some other Shiny sites, particularly ones in niche areas such as DollyMix and Hippyshopper and the only recommendation I got was... Shiny Shiny! Several times over. The sidebar widget had a lovely little animation to show me moving around the Internet but it clearly wasn't really responding to where I was very well.

One handy element is that it does track where you've been, so you can see a little constantly updating history of your behaviour. Although, come to think about it, that's what the Internet history is for.

The main problem that I have with Me.dium is that while it does an awful lot, it is not clear what it offers that you can't already gain from idly clicking through a blogroll. In terms of recommendation, Stumble is streets ahead, and maybe this is me just being crotchety, but I don't care about reading other people's comments so much as just having a new list of places to visit and make my mind up about.

Add some exciting new functionality - or point out some I've missed - and I'll get excited about Me.dium. Until then, it'll be another unused add-on cluttering up Firefox.

Me.dium