Medium: Browse with your friends

GigaOM is running a profile of Medium, a new startup that "thinks it can help make web browsing social by telling you what pages your friends are on at any moment, and where people are congregating on the web at that instant." The software comes in the form of a Firefox sidebar that displays real-time map of the web with the site you're currently visiting in the middle and "related" sites--determined by what people with similar browsing habits visit--surrounding it. Below that is a chat area where you can talk to other people who are visiting the same site as you. GigaOM's Liz Gannes describes the experience of following your friends around the web to see what they're looking at, and hopping over to a site where people are congregating. Though the chat thing has been done and done again, this social "map" aspect sounds pretty novel, and Gannes says it's easy to turn the tracking on and off, and that it's disabled by default for password-protected sites. Medium is currently in private, invite-only beta, but in classic Web 2.0 you can enter your e-mail address at the Medium web site to be notified when the site launches this winter.

Tags: chat, firefox, medium, social networking, social software, SocialNetworking, SocialSoftware, web