Twitter Founders Launch Medium

Twitter co founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone have launched a joint publishing application called Medium, which allows multiple people to submit photos and text to Pinterest-style content hubs.  It has been launched, ironically enough, by the San Francisco based The Obvious Corporation founded by Williams and Stone.

How it works

Medium is basically a function of sharing content under different categories. This is like Reddit, Medium has an assortment of different text, photos and videos which can be categorized by theme.  Users have different levels of activity and participation.  They can simply review subject matter, rate it, or add content to that collection. Although Medium has a distinct advantage of visual appeal compared to the much blander layout of Reddit, and the eye-catching appeal of Pinterest.

This seems to be another significant step in how online publishing is done.  So, instead of content being focused around people, it features photographs and text grouped into themed collections. Content within collections can be sorted by how “interesting” viewers rated it to be.

While Medium is basically a blogging platform, there is also a section called ‘Been There. Loved That’, and posts are organized into ‘collections’, within those bundles the blogs are combined depending on popularity. These collections are published as people’s own stories, photos and ideas.  So, the groups are categorized by the highest rated one being on top of the list.

Williams describes Medium as, “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.

The future of Medium

There is an expected business and revenue plan for this platform, but those details seem to be unclear at this point. The service is currently read-only for the general public, and invite-only for people who wish to publish.