At MIX07 this week I came across a cool new plug-in for IE7 called Me.dium that I thought you should know about. It's currently a Beta release but works just fine for me on IE7. While at first blush it might look like an instant messaging competitor, Me.dium's aim is different: it's designed to create connections between people viewing the same web site and uses collaborative filtering to suggest similar sites that might be of interest to its users. Their database collects URLs you've visited and chosen to share, your most recently visited web pages, your friends list and any other profile information you choose to share in order to run this data through their algorithm and generate a list of other sites relevant to one you're currently visiting, and consequently of potential interest to you.
The Me.dium folks, led by founder and inventor Robert Reich, had a session yesterday at this year's MIX where he introduced their creation to the audience and demonstrated its value to the developers, designers and press in attendance. He also announced Beta support for IE7 at the session; the product already supported FF 1.5 and 2.0 prior to this week.
In short, Me.dium demonstrates the fact that our actions and even thoughts are implicitly affected by those around us and in the meantime create a rich data set for predicting end-user behavior. It'll be interesting to see where it and other innovations of its ilk head in the future.