Me.dium is no more...

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Me.dium was replaced by something called OneRiot on the 11th of November and the Me.dium social map that I liked so much is no more.  So now I have to go through my web sites and remove all of the defunct Me.dium code and track down what will happen to Me.dium accounts.

According to Jennifer Lauren, Me.dium data "is no longer active and is contained in offline backup files that are not connected to OneRiot in anyway [sic]."

If you want your data and your Me.dium account to be deleted, you are going to have to send Jennifer an email.

Note the reviews at the FF add-on site since Me.dium disappeared - there have only been a few reviews posted since the change, and they are all negative:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4365#reviews

I tend to agree with commentator who says that all of the positive reviews that are reviews of the Me.dium application should be deleted (or OneRiot should have its own download page).  Weekly and total download counts should also be reset to zero as at 11 November 2008.

Will I be installing OneRiot?   Well, I won't be installing the toolbars or the Pulse Checker.  I'll only install the Search Provider (which adds OneRiot to Internet Explorer's built in search box) because I can see a potential research benefit if OneRiot's promised ability to feature the most popular results makes it easier to find the most current content and conversations out on the net (the biggest problem with Google and other search engines is sorting the recent from the old, and the noise and spam from the useful conversations).  But, that being said, a lot of the stuff that I work on is really obscure.  I wouldn't be doing my job well if I end up simply following a crowd - that's not the way to stay on the cutting edge.

I've gotta say, too, that I'm going to really miss the social map.

Published Tue, Dec 2 2008 11:55 by sandi
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Comments

# re: Me.dium is no more...

Wednesday, December 03, 2008 5:56 PM by tobias peggs

Hi Sandi. Thanks for picking up that Me.dium is now OneRiot.

Firstly an apology - we covered _a lot_ of different strands in making the leap from Me.dium to OneRiot, but one thing we didn't do well was reach out to all the bloggers who had installed the me.dium widget. The widget code should actually handle gracefully at the front end - i.e. your readers won’t notice that anything is there at all. However, it would have been infinitely better for us to tell you this before you "found it" - you especially, after all the support you have given us! Again, apologies.

Secondly, as you point out in your post, your data is your data - and we can delete that at your request. An email to Jennifer is all you need to send.

Thirdly, and more positively, i'd love to know what you think about the new social search service! As you noted, you don’t have to install anything to give it a go. The "download hurdle" was always a problem with the Me.dium model – i.e. you needed to download something to experience the socially relevant content recommendations. With OneRiot, _anyone_ can rock up to the website (www.oneriot.com) and search, and get socially relevant results on any subject (we call this the "pulse" of the web).

Of course, if you _want_ to install a toolbar, or a search plug in, feel free. With a toolbar, you can also opt-in to share anonymous information about your web-surfing activity, to help us build a better social search service for everyone. But that is _not_ a requirement of this new service – which will open it up to a lot more people. Note – you can also install our search services directly into IE from the official IE addons gallery at www.ieaddons.com/.../search

I take your point about your particular search queries probably being obscure. We do handle long tail queries very well thanks to a deal with Yahoo (we leverage their BOSS infrastructure), but our "special sauce" is definitely finding the news and videos that lots of people are talking about right now. (I’ll spare you a fully blown marketing pitch and leave it at that :)

Give me a shout if you have any questions at all!

All the best, Tobias @ OneRiot