There is a word that describes my passion for all things WWW… it starts with a “J” and ends with “unkie”. My work and my hobbies require that I spend a lot of time online so I’m always finding interesting sites and fun stuff I’d like to share with my readers, friends and family. It started with an email here, an email there, then the development of this blog, followed by a number of different social networking sites, including StumbleUpon, which quickly became my favorite way of sharing my finds with an audience.

Not too long ago, a StumbleUpon user asked me if there was a way that he could see the sites I was visiting in real time. I thought that sounded like a great idea, but currently, StumbleUpon does not have a feature that will allow users to track their friends while they gallivant from place to place around the Web.

Then Me.dium came upon the scene and redefined the concept of social networking completely. It’s a sidebar plugin for Firefox that reveals the online activities of people who are browsing at the same time you are. Animated icons move around in a cloud, showing you the sites other Me.dium users are visiting. Though you may not know all of the people in your cloud, you can see them because they are visiting similar sites or their activity is somehow related to yours. Similar to StumbleUpon, this feature makes certain that new sites will be recommended to you depending on what you are already interested in, the difference is that Me.dium does it all in real time.

And people can see you too! When you visit regular web sites, other users can see that you are on that page and may come to join you, but when you visit any site that requires a log-in, i.e. your Gmail account, your activity will be hidden. Also, while you are surfing, you can remain anonymous or allow users to see your username… and if you want to stop sharing your activity, it’s just a click of a button.



Oh, and did I mention the live chat? They’ve made it super easy to chat with your friends or with other users in your group cloud. The chat GUI sits right inside the sidebar interface. With a glance, you can see where your friends are surfing and click to join them. It's a beautiful concept; people from all over the world with similar interests communicating and sharing the web together at the same time for free.

Me.dium records and stores the URLs you share while visiting, your most recently visited web-pages, your friends list and your profile but they do not record or review the content of those websites. All browser communication is encrypted with 128-bit SSL.

It’s definitely a fun social network to belong to, and it can be even more fun if you have friends or family members who participate. That’s why I’m inviting all of you to join. Me.dium recently opened its doors to let a few people trickle in before they go public. This advancement in social networking is something you will want to be a part of. Click this link, look me up and add me to your friends list; my user name is stacyreed. Hope to see you there!