Browsing? Site lets you join the crowd

The new Web site Me.dium.com — still in beta stage — is built to change something that most of us probably take for granted: the fact that cruising the Internet is a pretty solitary activity.

Me.dium is based on the opposite idea — that people should be able to check out sites together, much as people get cues from one another and make serendipitous discoveries in the physical world.

“Being around people changes everything,” Me.dium Inc. CEO Kimbal Musk intoned several times during his six-minute presentation at the recent DEMO show for emerging technologies in Palm Springs, Calif.

Me.dium tracks your Web browsing habits and reveals which sites are being visited at any given moment by people and friends with similar patterns. Those people and their sites appear as colored icons in a window that Me.dium puts on the side of one’s Web browser.

The point is to let you see when friends or even a crowd of strangers are gathering on a site presumed to be of interest to you — the way an urban stroll might lead you to the curiosity-provoking sight of a line forming outside a nightclub.

Click on a “crowded” Web site and Me.dium takes your Web browser there. You can chat about the site’s contents with other people or recommend something else — another way of mimicking interactions in the “real” world.

The implications garnered some buzz at DEMO.

Among the biggest questions surrounded privacy: Why should I let other people follow me around the Web? Me.dium’s response: Because you’ll get hooked on the interactions with others. You can shut Me.dium off at any time, and it automatically suspends itself when a user visits banking sites and other secure Web pages.

However, Me.dium is in a very early stage. It’s available only by invitation for now, and only on open-source Firefox and Flock Web browsers. With such a small user base, it’s hard to see just how much value it might have.