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The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium
- irunbackwards 14y agoFeels/seems like smallest federated wiki.
- tbeseda 14y agoAnd/or how the World Wide Web was intended to function.
- irunbackwards 14y agoNot suggesting otherwise, I've been eager to try a platform like this with a lot of other users.
- SimianLogic2 14y agoSeems like a Pinterest for words instead of pictures.
- tonystubblebine 14y agoOne thing I really like on Medium is the composing experience. It's simple and beautiful. Sometimes I forget what a game changer that can be. But the Medium experience has been strong enough that I do almost all my writing there (even before you could have an audience).
- josh_miller 14y agoditto! i've even started to compose emails in it. rivals IA Writer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- 8ig8 14y agoI'd love to check this out. Are details available? Screen shots?
- hboon 14y agoI suppose you can see it at https://medium.com/ https://medium.com/
- 8ig8 14y agoWell that's where I originally looked. The commenter mentioned the composing experience, but I didn't find any details. If you coud point me to a UI demo or info, I'd appreciate it. I must be missing something. Thanks.
- hboon 14y agoIf you aren't signed in (or in browser private mode), and visit https://medium.com https://medium.com, you should see this http://cl.ly/image/3z293w0b2V0j http://cl.ly/image/3z293w0b2V0j. I don't have write access to the service either, but my guess is that's how it looks like? You can actually type, as well as replace the photo in that page. But you can't save.
- 8ig8 14y agoThanks. Now see it. I must have been expecting something different. Now it seems pretty obvious to me.
- dmix 14y agoI 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 http://getprismatic.com and it could be powerful. I'm curious when they will open it up to more bloggers.
- cag_ii 14y agoI 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?
- sunspeck 14y agoAnother walled garden? What is the advantage of posting to this service? Increased readership? Huge font? I don't see IP terms posted anywhere... Or any reason to be excited about this.
- dpup 14y agoTerms of Service: https://medium.com/c/675ebe56ac25 https://medium.com/c/675ebe56ac25
- drone 14y agoThat's not very transparent, how would I have found that visiting the site for the first time? In fact, there is no communication to the user before asking for access to post to their twitter account. I guess the intent is to be insiders-only? Kinda mysterious?
- dpup 14y agoYep, its linked from a couple of pages but needs to be more obvious. Will fix.
- drone 14y agoThanks - I didn't know if it was intentional. If I go to the site, the only link I have is to provide access to twitter. It does give it the feel of "somewhere I'm probably not supposed to be," which is why I was wondering if that was the intent.
- dpup 14y agoNot 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 https://medium.com/c/b969ac62a46b We'll certainly look into this more though. Thanks for raising the concerns!
- citricsquid 14y agoSo in simple terms what they're building is a new reddit but focused on self posts? Am I understanding that correctly?
- timdorr 14y agoWithout comments or downvotes. Honestly, what I'm seeing could be done with a fancy Wordpress theme. A good design does not mean you have a product.
- markkat 14y agoIt sounds something like that to me. I am doing something similar with hubski.com, where you essentially blog into an aggregator. I like the pieces of what's here, but I think masonry is a bit overdone, I personally like a higher information density.
- state 14y agoI find this kind of writing a bit frustrating. Big ambitions are described concretely, while the product itself is not so clear. Perhaps I'm not a part of the target audience.
- rjsamson 14y agoLooks 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 https://medium.com/c/e2e5df2e6649 feel like something out of an early 2000's CMS...
- ammmir 14y agohttp://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI should be required reading for every designer, developer, and stakeholder who is involved in building any kind of product on the web.
- mmahemoff 14y agoFor 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.
- ammmir 14y agoIf they're smart, they'll HTTP 301 redirect these old URLs to new ones, if they ever decide to change them. URI design is hard, especially when you're dealing with a single namespace on a site with massive scale like Twitter. But if everyone has their own namespace (it seems Medium is a good candidate for this), then you could as well use a human-readable timestamp in UTC (yyyy/mm/dd/hh-mm-ss), but they might be an eyesore for some. The fashion these days tends to be short, mixed-case, untypable URIs that don't look like they'll stand the test of time.
- jmduke 14y ago"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.
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- austenallred 14y agoI'm unconvinced. It's a compelling story for would-be-publishers who don't want to build up an audience, but to have that you have to leverage an audience. As a reader I feel like there are many places I would go to before medium.com if I wanted to read random content.
- guscost 14y agoFor anything that nice I'd probably do a Wordpress currently, but it will be interesting to see how this compares.
- arkitaip 14y agoI can't fully wrap my head around it - don't have Twitter, can't try it out - by just observing the surface details but it looks like a collaborative content platform with lots of emphasis on design. Love the large format photos and responsive design.
- greghinch 14y agoI will "me too" this as interesting. I think everyone can agree that the medium (no pun intended) for news and other written content has been in a general state of flux for the better part of two decades now. It seems like there is a new model for soliciting, curating, and distributing this content which is hard to exactly put a finger on, but we're getting closer. Efforts like this are refreshing to see, and hopefully will become something that much closer to the next "it"
- joelrunyon 14y agoOkay, I love the simplicity behind Obvious' work, but I'm seriously confused about what the purpose behind some of these projects. Lift - http://lift.do/ http://lift.do/ - tagline is "achieve anything" - give us your email. Nothing else. Branch - http://branch.com/ http://branch.com/ - was on HN the other day and has a pretty video, but I have no idea what they actually do as a product/service. Medium - http://medium.com/ http://medium.com/ - despite the nice blog post, I still have no idea what they do. Ev & co are undoubtably talented and they're working on what seems to be some cool stuff, but I feel like I've read a bunch of stuff about what they're doing and still have NO IDEA what it is they're doing. Is this just me?
- tonystubblebine 14y agoOn the Lift side, try reading this blog post, Everything There Is To Know About Lift: http://blog.lift.do/post/25435255834/everything-there-is-to-know-about-lift http://blog.lift.do/post/25435255834/everything-there-is-to-...
- tonystubblebine 14y agoAnd on the Branch side, you can try the service. It's available now and if you use it you get a pretty good sense of it. Also, try reading What is Branch Good For? http://branch.com/b/re-what-is-branch-good-for-2 http://branch.com/b/re-what-is-branch-good-for-2
- rokhayakebe 14y agoIt appears they are missing Jack. He was, apparently, behind the idea for Twitter, and now you can see his new venture took off and never stopped ever since. This being said, I think Branch is going to be one of the most influential products in coming years. Death to the monologues.
- fairramone 14y agoThey are creating Twitter overlays -- new applications that attempt to leverage the Twitter social graph in clever ways.
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- ollysb 14y agoFor 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.
- wikyd 14y agoLooking at the response headers, the powered-by header says "Food" (x-powered-by: Food). Is this a new web framework or just a little joke?
- dpup 14y agoYou can read about how we chose our tech stack here: http://branch.com/b/choosing-the-best-technology-for-my-website http://branch.com/b/choosing-the-best-technology-for-my-webs... (Seriously, though, it was just the first thing that came into my head when setting up the other X-headers.)
- chr15 14y agoProbably a joke. They are using Nginx, and you can easily add a custom header using the add_header directive[1] in the Nginx config. e.g. add_header "X-Powered-By" "Food"; [1]http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpHeadersModule#add_header http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpHeadersModule#add_header I sometimes throw in these kind of headers for fun on my own sites.
- dreamdu5t 14y agoBoring. Another blogging platform with no new functionality. What makes it better than Tumblr?
- desaiguddu 14y agoMedium to me looks like something similar to svbtle.com Where svbtle.com is new blogging platform , they are considering it as Publishing platform. The flagship kudos concept is part of Medium.com as well.
- karpathy 14y agoSo... it is a forum but posts in each thread are ordered based on upvotes instead of time, and displayed in Pinterest format? That's what I gather from 30 minutes of an exhaustive all-links traversal, at least.
- mikeleeorg 14y agoPart 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.
- cdmoyer 14y agoMy 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."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kul 14y agoHmm, I remember the reaction to Twitter at launch was very much, why would I ever use? What does it do?
- iswaveupyet 14y agoAhhh, it's a stealthy attempt to build a new Google Wave: (logo on their site) https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/45/45/0*ojw7_5O9gJL7Ik75572zzO0OITA*.png https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/45/45/0*ojw7_5O9...
- webwanderings 14y agoBoth Branch and Medium seems pretty exciting. I can now see why I can live with Twitter as a one-way link sharing media company. However, I can only wish that Branch would let people be in control of the environment they host for authentic conversation, i.e, they should start with tackling the issues of noise, spammers, trolls etc. Make things authentic for people so they feel trust towards conversing online. Medium seems little confusing at first but as a new publishing platform (over Wordpress and the rest of the old not-so-evolving-anymore), I look forward to participating.