Zak Wood / Colorado Daily

Me.dium employees from left, Ginevra Figg, Peter Nocchiero, and Chris Maller, work at their office located at 1050 Walnut St. Wednesday afternoon. Me.dium, which relocated to Boulder in 2006, is a software company that created a browser extension that allows friends to surf the internet and interact online.

Whether we admit it or not, many Web-surfers use Wikipedia at times – but does that mean we want it listed on top every time we enter a phrase into a search engine?

The Boulder-based social browsing software company Me.dium is betting that many surfers might rather see something else at the top of the page – such as URLs that are receiving lots of intentional Web hits. The company has launched a relatively new engine called Me.dium Social Search that can not only list its top sites at the time of a search, but will also update its results as crowd surfing activity changes.

David Mandell, Vice President of Marketing and a Me.dium co-founder, said Wednesday that its Social Search operation is very data-intensive, but said the real key isn’t managing the sheer volume – it’s in how well it operates in real time.

“There’s really no one else out there that has a real-time infrastructure that can manage that volume of activity on a real-time basis, other than us,” said Mandell.

It’s probably easier to understand what it’s like to use Social Search by checking it out, for free, at http://me.dium.com/promo/BeSocial than it is to read about it in the paper. But users can learn more about a URL’s current activity by checking out a series of “social search meta data” icons beneath the address.

One icon shows an item’s “crowd rank,” based on activity from the crowd of users of Me.dium’s Social Toolbar feature, and Mandell said about 2 million people have downloaded the Toolbar. Me.dium information said the Toolbar isn’t necessary to use Social Search, but Toolbar users gain social browsing value in ways such as, for example, being able to browse together with “friends” and to chat about what they’re experiencing.

Also, Me.dium has created an Unofficial CU Toolbar, which in part will allow users to access sites such as CULinks, CULearn and CUConnect from one place.

Other Social Search icons show a URL’s velocity of visitation – whether activity is increasing or decreasing – or if people are currently visiting a site. Icons will show the typical duration of a visit, as well as the level of visitation in the last day.

Mandell also said it is a free service, and the company will earn revenue the same way Google does – via search-based advertising.

“We’re pretty optimistic about it,” said Mandell. “If you look at any of the market numbers on the search-based advertising market, obviously Google makes quite a bit of money with it – and if you can get a small percentage of that, you’re still making quite a bit of money.”

Mandell said the concept for Me.dium started in New York, but the company was founded in Boulder in June 2006. He said part of the reason for the move was because he had worked with current Me.dium CEO Kimbal Musk in the past, and Musk was in Boulder at the time.

“The second thing was that we found tremendous support from both the technology and finance communities here in Boulder for what we were doing,” said Mandell. “We saw great access to talent, and finally, all of the founders are married with kids and were looking for quality of life. Boulder provided all of those things, where in any other market we’d have to make tradeoffs.”

Also, he said Me.dium has worked quite a bit with CU students, faculty and departments since the company was founded. He noted that Paul Jerde, Director of the Robert H. and Beverly Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the CU-Boulder Leeds School of Business, has been a “great friend” with the company, and said Me.dium people have participated in Deming Center forums and programs.

Ginevra Figg, Me.dium’s Marketing Coordinator and Director of Community, said Me.dium teams have also been all over campus during this year’s orientation.

“The idea was that we’d love to empower the freshman class to really start the revolution, get started early, and build this according to their activity and interest,” said Figg.

So, CU students who haven’t already heard about Social Search will probably have a chance to learn about it soon, and Mandell said he believes it will give people an opportunity to use and even help build a unique crowd-powered search network.

“It’s not really about replacing the traditional search, it’s about giving you a new layer of information that you never thought you’d be able to access before,” said Mandell. “And that’s based on crowd activity – so in essence, it’s what’s important to the crowds right now, as opposed to what computer-controlled robots and algorithms tell me I should be interested in.”

Contact Richard Valenty about this story at (303) 443-6272 ext. 126, or valenty@coloradodaily.com.