Me.dium Joins IE8 Launch, but Maybe Not the Crowd I’m Looking For
August 28, 2008 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
The social search technology in Me.dium is the latest partner in the IE8 search strategy. Joining with other partners like eBay, Facebook, and Yahoo! the IE8 software is coming closer and closer to the final product that we’ll be seeing hitting the market.
Me.dium’s Social Search has a unique ability to harness the activity of the crowds to let users find information that has relevance based on what people are actually looking at right now. This enhances Microsoft’s IE8 promises to deliver the best browser for what people do every day, making that experience faster, easier and safer than ever. Searching is the most commonly performed task on the web. By featuring Me.dium’s innovative search experience, IE8 now provides the user with an entirely new level of crowd-powered information on top of traditional search, and helps users to keep up with what’s hot, and see recommendations ranked by what people are actually looking at; reflecting the changing interests of the online community.
I like this type of integration into the browser, it’s just not quite the execution and functionality I’m really looking for yet. I understand that power of the “wisdom of crowds”, but for the most part it goes completely against what we were always told by our parents as kids right? "If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you join them?"
No.
That’s what I’m looking for things to change slightly. It’s not the wisdom of the "crowd" I’m really interested in, it’s the wisdom of "my crowd" of people. Who am I already trusting and who all is already a part of my extended social network.
I want to harness what the people in my address book are searching for and think is important. I want to hear from my twitter followers what they’ve found that’s interesting. To a degree I’m interested in what my friends on MySpace and Facebook say, but to a lesser degree. I trust the people I’m interacting with regularly. Not just the general Internet crowd.
I like the idea of filtering by friends, but I think the mass of Internet users is also useful for some things. PageRank essentially clusters off of the whole Internet anyway — the only thing me.dium adds is a more real-time aspect. Particularly in areas of current events, I have found it gives some surprising results of nascent trends well before mainstream media picks up on them.