A few days ago a friend of mine posted about a new beta service called Zweitgeist, which enables you to see people who are on the same webpage like yourself. Those people are shown as little avatars right to the bottom of the page you are actually reading. And they aren’t only shown, you can even “talk” to one another.
While being on a megasite like Google’s, the benefit of such a service isn’t too obvious to me because people aren’t on this site because of a similar reason (ok, they want to search, but there’s usually no common subject). On the other hand if I’m browsing on a more specialized site on the net it could be very interesting to virtually meet those other people because they have something in common: a subject/interest/intention, whatever the site is about. And that’s the value of such services: get to know people which are looking for the same kind of information at the same time like you are!
While the concept of making people on same websites visible to one another isn’t entirely new (odigo offered a comparable service about six to eight years ago), these times of Web 2.0 those business models look significantly more promising because of all the public focus on “social content”.
Me.dium is a start-up which offers exactly that kind of functionality to its users. However, compared to Zweitgeist it doesn’t show other users right in your browser by showing fancy little avatars (which imho could be pretty annoying on the long run) but in a sidebar, so it’s completely unobtrusive. Further advantages of the sidebar implementation: messages you post on a certain webpage to other visitors aren’t distributed all around the bottom of your browsing screen but chronologically sorted in one place. Me.dium’s service is based on the xmpp protocol stack (that’s the same that Jabber IMs like Google Talk are built on), so you can not only use it as a website meeting place, you can even use it as instant messenger with your friends (which you could have met on any page 
). And even better: you get the best of two worlds: you can see, which pages your friends are actually on.
Unfortunately Me.dium users aren’t able to message users of other jabber networks right now, but because of the xmpp protocol that should be only a matter of time.
At the moment, Me.dium still is in closed beta with not too much users on other websites, but they are slowly opening up: here’s a special link where you can easily sign-up.
See you @ Me.dium
