Earlier this week Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams unveiled Medium, a platform that takes photos and text submitted by users and turns that information into collections that will be available for public viewing and editing. This service, which will combine aspects of photo-sharing, blogging, social networking, and tweeting, is designed to organize and categorize creative and quality user-generated content and encourage user interaction. Medium is an undertaking of Obvious Corporation, Williams’ and Stone’s startup.
In his Tuesday post on his company website, Williams stated, “The Obvious Corporation decided to take on the project of building a new publishing platform from scratch, not just because it’s in our wheelhouse, but because we believe publishing—and media, more broadly—is important.” The Twitter co-founder also observed that, “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.”
“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,” Williams wrote. “All posts are organized into ‘collections,’ which are defined by a theme and a template.”
In his Medium post, Williams linked to several collections in order to give examples of how this new platform will work. The linked “collection of nostalgic photos” shows pictures from Obvious employees’ childhoods and demonstrates the type of creative and engaging structure that will generate quality content and promote user dialogue.
Williams, who believes that Obvious’ new platform will provide a place for relevant media to be produced, shared, and reviewed, summarized the essence of Medium when he observed that the service will help “. . . people get the most out of their time in this world of infinite information.” Although the new publishing platform is not yet available for public use, Twitter users can review and provide feedback on Medium posts. Until its public launch, those interested in Medium can follow and provide feedback @medium on Twitter.
Sources Include: Wall Street Journal & San Francisco Chronicle
