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The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

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Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#31

Post by ollysb »

For a moment there I thought they were going to try and bring editors back to the publishing process. The blog gave us open publishing, anyone who wants to can push up their words. What's missing though is the polish and refinement that the editorial process gives more traditional publishing. When they started talking about choosing the level of participation I was expecting them to say that people could now choose to be editors. I'm not sure exactly how the interactions authors and editors would self-organise into useful pairings/groupings but if we cracked that I do think we'd see higher quality emerging.

Perhaps people could create their own 'zines from other people's articles. They choose the articles they like, and then refine the tone and content to form a coherent publication.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#32

Post by cag_ii »

dmix wrote: post #6

I love it. I spent quite a while on various blogs on medium. The sorting by quality made it quite interesting. Combine that with a recommendation system like http://getprismatic.com and it could be powerful. I'm curious when they will open it up to more bloggers.

I signed up, and don't see how one would actually discover or browse content on medium. Aside from the links in the submitted article, it all seems like dead ends.

Is there something I'm missing?

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#33

Post by dpup »

rjsamson wrote: post #13

Looks interesting - to me it seems similar in a lot of ways to svbtle, at least as far as what they are trying to do. Its a small thing, but I'm somewhat turned off by the urls - urls like https://medium.com/c/e2e5df2e6649 feel like something out of an early 2000's CMS...

I totally agree about the URLs. We decided not to launch with human readable URLs since we didn't want to deal with the namespacing issues right away. i.e. /user/post vs /collection/post vs just /post. I'm a huge fan of URLs as part of the interface, so I'm sure its something we'll implement.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#34

Post by [deleted] »

dpup wrote: post #33
rjsamson wrote: post #13

Looks interesting - to me it seems similar in a lot of ways to svbtle, at least as far as what they are trying to do. Its a small thing, but I'm somewhat turned off by the urls - urls like https://medium.com/c/e2e5df2e6649 feel like something out of an early 2000's CMS...

I totally agree about the URLs. We decided not to launch with human readable URLs since we didn't want to deal with the namespacing issues right away. i.e. /user/post vs /collection/post vs just /post. I'm a huge fan of URLs as part of the interface, so I'm sure its something we'll implement.

[deleted]

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#36

Post by don_neufeld »

dpup wrote: post #33
rjsamson wrote: post #13

Looks interesting - to me it seems similar in a lot of ways to svbtle, at least as far as what they are trying to do. Its a small thing, but I'm somewhat turned off by the urls - urls like https://medium.com/c/e2e5df2e6649 feel like something out of an early 2000's CMS...

I totally agree about the URLs. We decided not to launch with human readable URLs since we didn't want to deal with the namespacing issues right away. i.e. /user/post vs /collection/post vs just /post. I'm a huge fan of URLs as part of the interface, so I'm sure its something we'll implement.

Just seconding Dan's answer here, I'm a big fan of human readable URLs as well. They are on our roadmap but we didn't include them in this initial release for reasons including but limited to the namespace issues Dan mentioned.

As Ev said in his post this release is a preview and we're not done by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#37

Post by mmahemoff »

d0vs wrote: post #25
dangrossman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashbangs existed for a very short period of Twitter's life. They were a mistake. They're gone now.

And Twitter is even slower...

Seriously? I found it unbearably slow until the big update a few months ago. I simply couldn't use the website. Now it's fine again.

Re: The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

#39

Post by mmahemoff »

jmduke wrote: post #18
mmahemoff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. And it's funny coming from Obvious. Twitter's traditionally one of the best examples of real-world cool URIs. Hopefully it's just a prototype thing, but you'd think they'd want even these early URLs to be shared with love.

"Twitter's traditionally one of the best examples of real-world cool URIs." Do you mind expanding on this? I thought hashbangs were a rape and pillage of URI convention.

I wasn't thinking of hashbangs, which will ultimately be noise in the history of Twitter. (I could get into a debate about why they weren't that bad, but it's all (HTML5) history now, so I'll move on.)

I was thinking mostly about the clean, namespaced, REST scheme for their API, which you can see at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api. And it's not just a separate API, as it corresponds closely to the website URLs too.

Generally, Twitter and Digg were the best examples of real-world REST implementations around that time. That people like Oatmeal are making fun of the crazy-long Plus URIs [1] shows it's not just RFC longbeards pontificating about The Right way to build web apps. At least some end-users notice and care about this stuff too.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/google-plus-the-oatmeal/

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