Comments on: Me.dium Raises $15 Million

By: Herb Morreale

Herb Morreale — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 18:19:30 +0000

Jay,

I agree we have a lot to prove. However, I can certainly say that my team is very aware of the challenges, and have taken some very innovative approaches.

We don’t take lightly that we are building possibly the first large scale real-time relevancy map of the Internet. Since day one we have engineered the backend with the idea of thousands of connected servers serving real-time data to millions of clients. Sure, we probably don’t have it right, because that’s usually the case, but I’ve spoken to experts in the field of distributed computing and they support our approach. We’ll all just have to wait and see.

My main point is: A lot of people don’t understand the level of investment we’ve made, and continue to make to be a stand along company. And, as Brad said, we know we go no where if we don’t take our customers privacy very seriously.

Hope these comments from the other side of he wall are helpful.

Herb Morreale
CTO
Me.dium

By: Brendan Lally

Brendan Lally — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 20:41:44 +0000

Brad,
as a “user” how different are they from http://www.cluztr.com/about/ ?

Lal

By: Jay Neely

Jay Neely — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:36:57 +0000

Thanks for the answers Brad, I’ll keep an eye on Me.dium.

Best,
Jay Neely, Social Strategist
http://socialstrategist.com

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 23:29:56 +0000

@Jay: Re: scaling – that’s a big part of the magic behind the technology. A lot of this is software – it’s not just building a whole bunch of infrastructure.

Re: the goal – Me.dium has aspirations to be a significant standalone company that accomplishes some unique things.

By: Jay Neely

Jay Neely — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:47:46 +0000

“given where Me.dium is going”. I’d be happy to be proven wrong at a later date, I’m currently evaluating the product as is. Next major update, I’ll give it another try.

But if we ignore the usefulness of Me.dium for a second, what about the second problem: scaling? Will Me.dium be able to scale past an early-adopter audience? Past a Flickr-sized audience? Up to a mainstream audience? Caching solutions will only help so much when the focus of the tool is on live tracking, to an unlimited number of sites.

Is Me.dium hoping they’ll be acquired by a company that already has that kind of infrastructure(my first thought was Google, but thinking about it more I think Cisco would be a good choice as well)? If not, what companies are they hoping to partner with or services to use to make that much processing power available cost-effectively?

By: mathew johnson

mathew johnson — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:01:01 +0000

if anything is a good candidate for facebooking, me.dium would be it.

put some pre-existing trusted friend circles to work on the collaborative browsing thing.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 13:31:52 +0000

Jay – I took a look at the comments on your blog. While I appreciate your skepticism, I disagree with your assertions. I’ve been a heavy IM user and – given where Me.dium is going – there is no way that IM + send URL is better. In addition, the privacy issue you raise is a red herring – the Me.dium guys are absolutely obsessed with the issue of privacy and making sure they always do the right thing via the user. Finally, the signal to noise ratio issue is a key one – as my Me.dium active friend list has grown – the signal has increased really nicely.

Of course only time will tell, but I’m extremely enthusiastic about the potential of what the Me.dium guys are doing. Hopefully you’ll periodically give it another shot.

By: Jay Neely

Jay Neely — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:10:16 +0000

Brad, I think you’re mis-characterizing Alex’s post a bit by saying “he describes Me.dium as