This is a story I'd completely ignore if it weren't for the guy backing the project. Evan Williams, co-founder of both Twitter and Blogger, has launched a new communications platform called Medium.
At first glance, Medium looks a lot like Pinterest and a little like Williams's previous projects, Twitter and Blogger. Or maybe it's Reddit for normal people.
Users share content in "collections." Content can be photos, arranged pleasingly in a grid. Or it can be text.
Ideas that seemed radical at the time -- that anyone, anywhere could and should publish their thoughts to the global Internet audience (for free) -- are now taken for granted.
Still, some things haven't evolved as much as we would have expected. Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there's been less progress toward raising the quality of what's produced. While it's great that you can be a one-person media company, it'd be even better if there were more ways you could work with others. And in many ways, the web is still mimicking print concepts, while not even catching up to it in terms of layout, design, and clarity of experience...
He goes on to explain how Medium works:
Medium is designed to allow people to choose the level of contribution they prefer. We know that most people, most of the time, will simply read and view content, which is fine. If they choose, they can click to indicate whether they think something is good, giving feedback to the creator and increasing the likelihood others will see it.
Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience. All posts are organized into "collections," which are defined by a theme and a template. (For example, this post is in the About Medium collection with a simple article template.)
Medium is backed by Obvious Corp., which launched Twitter. (Note that the link is to a Medium post signed by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.)
This is pretty interesting. Medium looks like a natural extension of Twitter and blogging. Like blogging, it allows posts of arbitrary length -- a few words or a long essay -- along with multimedia content.
But it also partakes of Twitter. Twitter started out as a service where you followed individual people or organizations -- @MitchWagner, for example, or @NetEvolution -- but it's been moving away from that. With the evolution of Trending Topics and hashtags on Twitter, individuals can follow particular subjects and discussions. But still, Twitter remains primarily a service where you follow accounts, not subjects.
Medium seems to be designed to turn that on its head. On Medium, the collections appear to be king. Entries are signed by their authors, but clicking on the byline doesn't lead to other Medium entries (which is what you'd expect) -- it leads to that person's Twitter account. Individual entries on Medium float to the top or sink to invisibility based on the number of times users click a button to approve of the entry. That's where Medium looks a bit like Reddit, or Digg.
So it's easy to imagine that on a breaking news story -- the Olympics, for example, or the Mars landing -- people could contribute to collections on the subject, and other people could subscribe to those collections.
The marketing implications are big. Instead of the brand leading the conversation, as it does on a Facebook page or Twitter account, the brand can be just one voice in a conversation with the market. Or companies might participate in collections for product support, market research, or for their industry.
It's an intriguing experiment. And the world must take notice of Williams's work; he partakes a little of that Steve Jobs magic. His projects usually succeed. I'm keeping an eye on Medium, and enterprise IT managers and executive marketers should do the same.
On the other hand, how many social media sites are we supposed to follow? I was just getting settled in to Google+ and Reddit. Now I need to follow this, too?
Let's explore Medium together. Leave your impressions in the comments below.
And another service I'm supposed to add to my daily chores? I don't think so. There has to be a limit to what the average person can spend time doing, in what appears to be just another unique way to waste time, and another company that may or may not hit the big time and get backers or float stock. Thanks, but no thanks, no matter the credenials of the founder.
My sentiments exactly, Mitch! I already tweet, update Facebook, get my grams on and pin the occasional pin.. Medium will have to take off first before I squeeze in some time to start meeding (I like how you came up with this term!)
My sentiments exactly, Mitch! I already tweet, update Facebook, get my grams on and pin the occasional pin.. Medium will have to take off first before I squeeze in some time to start meeding (I like how you came up with this term!)
As I read about Mitch's take on Medium.. I thought, Not another social network! I think the niche is saturated as it is, and while Medium sounds interesting and fresh, I think I'll just wait and see if it takes off.
I'm going to go and sign up for Medium and see what it looks like. The subject part of it though seems like Microsoft's So.cl. I couldn't get into that one specifically because I chose some subjects but I could never get it tuned quite right (and there weren't a lot of people on it at the time). In any case, I think this subject-based stuff is likely the next wave, it seems to me like the tools need to be more sophisticated in order to give people what they want. I think one of the reasons Twitter works this way now is because of the evolution it has gone through and the tools that have been built around it (if I couldn't use something like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck it would be nearly useless). Maybe these new networks like So.cl and Medium need to evolve a bit more.
I thought Twitter was dumb when I first heard about it. Now I check it four or five times a day and post to it 20 times a day. I'm an addict now.
I thought MySpace was dumb when I first heard about it. I never did get into MySpace, but Facebook has the same features I thought were dumb, and I'm on that almost as often as Twitter.
And I thought Second Life was brilliant.
I've given up using my own barometer to determine what's going to be hot. I just try to watch for things taking off, and get in early.
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At the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit here in Nashville, I'm hearing many stories about how businesses have adapted their IT strategies in response to this rapidly changing, pressurized, data-driven commercial world.
Neal Stephenson is best known as the author of science fiction novels such as SnowCrash and Anathem. But he does other things as well. Among them: He's assembled a team of scientists and engineers to figure out how to build a 20-kilometer-tall tower to use as a platform for launching rockets into space.
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A recent release of the popular TweetDeck app for Twitter power-users gives new life to software that had previously taken a wrong turn. Here's a quick walk-through of the new TweetDeck, to show you why it should be at the top of your Twitter toolkit.
Elizabeth Pizzinato, SVP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, calls content marketing "the new black" and explains how her brand engages its target audience.
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The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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