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Me.Dium - Be Social

Written by Angelo on Thursday, September 4th, 2008

This is a post from Extendably’s new regular author Angelo. Each week he will be reviewing individual Firefox extensions.

me.dium

The social web is a result of everyone’s desire to be connected instantly with the whole world, and we all seem to have caught the bug. Websites like Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku allow us to make a quick updates to the world. Tumblr allows you to keep a blog that you don’t need to spend a lot of time writing for. Meebo allows you to create chat rooms and connect to your already created instant messaging services. Widget platforms grab information from other websites and pull them around the net.

The entire web has caught on to this inter-connectivity and Me.Dium is trying to bring it to the browser.

Me.Dium

Me.Dium is probably the most famous social add-on for browsers. It was promoted as a new way to surf the web, and it was probably the first add-on that actually added integrated chat. Me.Dium installs itself onto Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer through a sidebar and shows you a “map” of people who are visiting the same website as you but also shows you related websites. Me.Dium looks great, but overall the functionality of a social chat add-on is limited by the number of users it can garner.

Me.Dium

While I couldn’t find anything about the number of people still USING Me.Dium Firefox states 2,369 weekly downloads and 152,996 total downloads for Me.Dium. I’m sure at least a few people are still out there using it. My brief brush with Me.Dium showed that it did have a few features that make it useful, but not enough for me to keep it.

One good feature of Me.Dium is that it imports your Facebook friends so that you can keep track of recent Facebook updates. But technically, this isn’t something that it touts as a major feature. It’s essentially like having Facebook open, because all it really does is give you updates.

Me.Dium also offers some unique features for Internet Explorer 8 users, a webslice of “what’s hot” on Me.Dium and an accelerator.

For those of you who are more security oriented Me.Dium stops broadcasting your information whenever you visit a secure website (https). That means your private data is kept private. Still, I probably wouldn’t check my bank account with it, but I’m a little paranoid that way.