Colorado-based Me.dium is announcing today a $15M Series B round led by Commonwealth Venture Partners. Me.dium is developing a next-generation collaborative browsing technology that dynamically combines visualization and chat. We covered Me.dium during its February launch at DEMO. We noted at the time that me.dium appeared quite intrusive on users - both from privacy and activity point of view. So how has it developed since then?
Since DEMO, the service has gone through a round of improvements and revisions. I spoke to founder and CMO David Mandell, who told me that the beta has been expanding nicely and that there has been a lot of very positive feedback coming from users. This would have to be the case, otherwise why would CVP send a huge check across the country (current investors Spark Capital, Appian Ventures and Brad Feld also participated in this round). So why do these VCs think that me.dium has such big potential? It so happens that Me.dium has a chance to literally break outside the box that we described in our recent Evolution of Communication post. Remember the following diagram:
When we wrote about Me.dium over four months ago, we described it as 'social browsing'. Perhaps a refinement of this would be collaborative browsing, and that would be a more precise definition of what the company is trying to do. At the heart of Me.dium is the idea that by enabling real-time discovery and communication during browsing, this will enable people to get things done faster and in ways not possible before.
During my interview with the company founders, we discussed the typical scenarios for using Me.dium:
An example of the first scenario would trying to book a trip with a friend. You go to a common site, do research and chat with each other. An example of the second scenario would be shopping for a gadget. When you navigate to sites, you notice other people on those sites and you can strike up a conversation with them. In both of these use cases, the idea is to collaborate during browsing to make things easier.
The third example, as explained by the founders, is crowd following. This is similar to the scenario of walking on a street and seeing a lot of people in a restaurant, leading you to decide that this is a good place to be. By analogy, as you are browsing you may notice people flocking to a site - and decide to follow them. To me, this is less likely use cause - because it is difficult to discern behavioral patterns of a crowd, particularly using a network-like user interface. Perhaps if the hot spots were suggested in a different way, then it would be easier to embrace. But these sort of things can be always be tweaked.
So the $15M dollar question is what is Me.dium planning to do next? In a nutshell, the company is planning to spend the money on refining and scaling its sophisticated matching technology. The secret sauce here is in connecting people based on their browsing patterns. Doing so dynamically for hundreds of thousands of users is hard algorithmically and very intense computationally.
Beyond the technology, the company will also have to invest in building a community of followers. Clearly there are a lot of privacy issues here and the fact that your browsing history is being sent to a server in Colorado might not be an exciting prospect. Yet, Me.dium takes a strong stand on information - they say that the user owns all of it. To succeed, the company needs to continue to drum this beat and to act accordingly, which they have been doing so far.
In terms of monetization, if this takes off then the sky is the limit. Me.dium will become a haven for advertisers, because of its huge contextual relevancy. During the interview we discussed several possible future revenue streams, all revolving around contextual ads. But for the foreseeable future the company will remain focused on building its platform and expanding its user base.
So will this work? Can Me.dium become the next communication paradigm, or will it be perceived as a glorified chat? This series B investment puts a serious stake in the ground and announces to the world that the game is on. Certainly the company itself and the investors think that this has great potential to become big. But will it? We are not so sure.
So let's see what Read/WriteWeb readers think - would you use Me.dium and do you think it will take off?
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Guys from Me.dium, please make it compatible with my opera.
Posted by: Aleksas | June 11, 2007 5:44 AMI found the interface unusable and the essential value proposition undesireable - but then I didn't think much of Twitter until I started using it extensively either!
One concern I do have is that Me.dium doesn't appear to facilitate asynchronous as well as synchronous connections between people. I think constant synchronous communication is relatively untenable - social tools need to default to asynchronous, with plenty of value there, and in some cases an easy way to find value in facilitated synchronous communication as well. IMHO. In other words, I'd rather have a good solid Attention Data profile that I could expose to friends, perhaps along with my OPML file and "Lifestream" to provide a BlogRovr-like functionality or recommendations available to me after I do what I'm doing - not while I'm in the middle of doing it.
I've talked to the Me.dium guys though and they are heavy hitters, so add $15m more to that equation and hopefully they can figure out something really good. I'd say the rise of Twitter is good news for them, though.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | June 11, 2007 8:47 AMI tried out one of the early betas, and haven't tried out the later revisions, but the essential concept seems to fail. How often when shopping in the real world do you stop to chat to your fellow shoppers about what the best choice would be for you? Sure, you do it, but not nearly often enough to justify the screen estate this cumbersome sidebar takes up.
All this algorithmic matching also seems pointless -- I don't want recommendations from similar strangers, I want it from trusted friends.
Posted by: Laurie | June 11, 2007 9:14 AMThanks for the great feedback, Marshall.
Our initial focus has been to bring a security focused, real-time, social experience to surfing. We've got big plans for adding in additional value based upon the ability to share attention streams that this second round of funding will open up. We'll have a few details coming out this week on our blog at http://me.dium.com.
Thanks again and please keep your insights coming.
Posted by: Dean Steadman | June 11, 2007 10:50 AM@Laurie: You asked how often one chats with fellow shoppers. I think that's a good question. I find myself trusting fellow shoppers more than the sales people; however, I'm not sure I would feel the same trust online. In the electronic world, I would probably suspect it much easier for the store to "plant" fellow shoppers, knowing that the system specifically encourages social communications among shoppers.
Posted by: Matt Henderson | June 11, 2007 12:07 PM@Laurie, I agree with the network being much more relevant if it's based on trusted friends, yet the thought of sending out more invites to yet another web app/software client hurts.
i'd be much more interested in "plugging in" this collaborative browser to existing social networks, specifically facebook, which is emerging as the social network of choice.
my friends are tired of getting invites to more online services. fix that, and i'm much more interested.
Posted by: Baratunde Thurston | June 11, 2007 12:12 PM@Baratunde, Matt, Laurie - good thread guys. Like Matt, I certainly like to talk to fellow shoppers (in the "real world") - generally because people looking for the same stuff as me have done their research, are keen to share their knowledge, and also like to engage in the social nature of shopping. I totally get that same experience online with Me.dium too. (disclosure: I work there).
Posted by: tobiaspeggs | June 11, 2007 3:05 PMAlso note that Me.dium’s people-matching algorithms are weighted towards your friends - so you are more likely to bump into your friends online, and get their recommendations, than you are other users.
As Dean says above, you can check out details on our blog. Or, better, sign up and see me in me.dium - so we can get some real-time interaction going. (http://me.dium.com/from/5d48c)
Again, thanks for all the feedback and comments.
So much money, so few users. I do agree that user's clickstream data is very valuable to advertisers, but is Medium the vehicle to harvest this data?
1 million is funding per 1000 users has to be a new record.
Posted by: Craig Baker | June 11, 2007 3:37 PMI tried so hard to use Me.dium after I saw it at DEMO but I just couldn't get any value out of it. Like most social apps, it only "works" if you have a lot of friends using it. Maybe I don't hang out with the right crowd, but even my friends who are big on web 2.0 didn't really seem to like it much. The thought of chatting with strangers about whatever site I happened to be browsing never crossed my mind...it would be like walking up to another shopper in the grocery store and asking about whatever product they were looking at. Unless she's a hot mom, it's just not the kind of thing that people usually do.
In my personal experiences with me.dium, I found it to be a bit too much in terms of system resources. Just having netvibes open with my hundreds of feeds puts a big enough train on firefox and system memory...me.dium didn't seem to provide enough value to justify the extra overhead so I dropped it.
The biggest plus for it was that it let my friend instant message with me while he was at work because his company hadn't blocked me.dium like they had IM and meebo.
Posted by: Joel | June 11, 2007 6:46 PMAlex, nice analysis. I also tried it and uninstalled it, I really don't think Me.dium provides enough value to make it worth it. The "three typical scenario" problems they're trying to solve are already better solved by better technologies. In my blog, I wrote:
* ‚ÄúYou and your friend are trying to accomplish a common task‚Ä?. How does a browser plugin that lets me a) see where my friend is, and b) chat, accomplish this any better than an IM conversation where we send each other links? It‚Äôs simpler, most IM clients support logging so our collaboration is saved, and it keeps me from being distracted by the unimportant sites a friend browses until he messages me with an important one.
* ‚ÄúYou are trying to do something on your own and meet others who are trying to do the same thing‚Ä?. Forums, chat rooms, social networks, a site‚Äôs own social features: there are dozens of better ways to accomplish this more easily with fewer privacy concerns.
* ‚ÄúYou are observing the patterns of crowds nearby and so you are able to discover new things.‚Ä? There‚Äôs far, far too much noise in people‚Äôs browsing habits for you to be able to outmatch the performance of a simple search for similar sites. Other tools solve the ‚Äúdiscover new things‚Ä? problem with much less effort. StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, etc.
The rest of my analysis can be found at http://socialstrategist.com/2007/06/11/occasional-links-medium-funding-photos-studies-and-patents
We'll see where Me.dium goes, and I look forward to your future coverage of it.
Posted by: Jay Neely | June 11, 2007 8:17 PM@Marshall - Me.dium does provide for some asynchronous connections. If you post a message to the live tab, it doesn't disappear if you log off or leave that conversation, thus allowing for people to view your post even if you "aren't there". Also, you can send messages to users if they aren't online. When they log back in, they'll get the messages.
Posted by: jasonz | June 12, 2007 10:39 AM