I stumbled upon a social browsing site that immediately caught my eye - it's called Me.Dium.
What is Me.Dium? By their own definition, "Me.dium is a social browsing software company offering a browser extension that allows people to surf with friends." Me.Dium was founded in 2006 and is compatible with a range of browsers in addition to Microsoft Internet Explorer, including Firefox, Flock, and The Songbird Media Player.
The Me.Dium browser extension presents a visual depiction of what your "friends" are looking at online at that exact moment. What makes Me.Dium unique is that everything in Me.Dium is always presented in real time. If I give you permission, you could see what URL I'm looking at right this very moment.
Now, I know for many of you that sounds a bit scary. Many of you will have privacy concerns. I understand. I had to ask myself this question: Do I really want people knowing my every move online? Perhaps not, but I' like to consider the potential benefits of anything before simply writing it off. The only way I know to do that is to actually try it. :)
It should be noted that you can set yourself to "invisible" anytime you like. So, if you want to hide, you certainly can. I have been using Me.Dium for over a week now and have only invited and followed a very small number of people. The people I invited were folks who surf the web looking for solutions and ideas as a matter of course in their daily lives. They spend a good amount of their time in "exploration" mode and I knew that being able to see what they were looking at in real time might present some opportunities for discussion.
I recorded a short video of my first use of Me.Dium so you can see how it works.
Me.dium Seems To Fit Pretty Darn Good from respres on Vimeo.
How might this be used in your real estate world?
Me.Dium was not built to be a business application, but I think it could have some strong business uses. You'll have your own ideas, but here are a few ideas that come to mind.
- Learning From Trusted Sources: Friend and follow those whose opinions you respect. Join them as they are exploring a site you've not seen yet. Chat with them instantly about their thoughts.
- Timely Local Conversations: Invite a few of your local real estate friends and use the sidebar. Alert each other to timely news in your local area. Chat in real time about the issue, event or finding.
- Discuss New Listings: Friend other agents and brokers in your local area and use the tool to chat about new homes for sale or problems around specific listings.
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Social Search: Looking for something and just can't seem to find it? Enlist your friends to help you search. We all search differently. So two heads (or 10) may be better than one.
My personal opinion is that Me.Dium is a tool that will be best utilized with a small number of people at a time. The visual window is not very large, so populating it with as many followers as I have on Twitter, for example, would make for a tangled mess of activity. It would simply be visually impossible to follow the movements.
I have a few suggestions. Since I am certain the folks responsible for making changes to Me.Dium will be reading this post, I have 2 simple suggesstions that would make this a more powerful exploration tool for business purposes.
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Friend Groups: Allow me to organize friends into groups so I can follow a certain group at certain times. And allow people to be placed more than one group.
- Selective Hiding: Allow me to hide myself from some people, but not others. There are times when I might like to use this for private exploration within a tighter circle of friends, or just my co-workers. Right now, I can only set myself to visible or invisible.
Me.Dium is one of those applications that you have to try for yourself. So, if you'd like to give it a test run, go install the browser plugin and find me. I'm respres on Me.Dium. I will have it running almost continuously.
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