The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

Part of me is a wannabe writer and I love the craft of writing. With that perspective, I see Blogger and Twitter as heralding two innovative new forms of writing:

Blogger (and blogging) brought about short-form personal essays; Twitter brought about ultra-short-form personal messages.

Both have spawned many other uses as well, as people made each their own. But the writer in me loved the limitations each had, since limitations often leads to creativity.

So I'm excited about what Medium could be. Looking at their examples, my guess is they're mashing together elements of Pinterest and Tumblr (and Svbtle). Perhaps they see power in making publishing more visual and flexible. A visually-appealing layout invites a reader in. And there are all kinds of writers - or better - content creators. Some are visual (hence the all-image collections), some are textual, some are a mix of both. Perhaps in the future, they'll offer video and audio too. Well, maybe not audio ;) (cough cough Odeo cough)

Will it work? I think they've got something interesting here, though I don't see a leap that's as revolutionary as Blogger or Twitter yet.

As a content creator, my main concerns are:

+ Is it easy to create? (This is perhaps the biggest concern)

+ Can I express myself in the form I want to? (In whatever format I prefer)

+ Can I be creative in my expression? (Sometimes limitations are good here)

+ Will I have an audience? (The follower system seems to work well here, as well as ways to share to other social media networks)

+ Can I hear from my audience? (Comments, likes, votes, ratings, etc; moderation and filtering is key here)

+ How can my ego be fed? (Creators may not think about this consciously, but all public creators care about their reputation, be it through audience engagement, social media metrics, etc)

Blogger, Twitter, and other social media creation tools offer these to some extent. I think part of Blogger and Twitter's success was how they enabled the first bullet point: they made creating content easy. Ridiculously easy.

The examples Medium offered only show off the final products, so I don't know anything about the creation process. Will it be ridiculously easy to use, easier than Blogger, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc? It looks very interesting, but I don't get a feeling of it being revolutionary. At least, not yet.

Not the intent. Just trying to find the balance between UI clutter and ease of access to information. As a stop gap links have been added to a post in the "About Medium" collection: https://medium.com/c/b969ac62a46b

We'll certainly look into this more though. Thanks for raising the concerns!

My immediate thought was, "Neat, I'm going to add this to my feed reader and see how it progresses." Followed by... "Hmm, no RSS link." (view source)... "Huh."

As a tl;dr person, I just don't get the message: "We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview." is about as buzzword saturated as possible. Plus their homepage says "Your text here".

I feel every so often a designer has an urge: let's just build it and see what people use it for. It sometimes works, but mostly the user just stares at the screen until something distracts him/her, and then wanders off.

Not quite as bad as the internal links: https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fr%2F%3F...

But I actually really like the look and feel, so I've signed up. I'm sure they'll hammer the issues out.