The brains behind Blogger and Twitter have released a new content publisher called Medium.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone co-founded Obvious, a company that helped create the popular platforms Blogger and Twitter. Williams and Stone hope their new project helps advance collaborative publishing and create a more polished product than their previous projects.
“Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information,” explains Williams, “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.”
The two are confident that Medium will mark an “evolutionary step” in Web publishing, reports Fast Company. And that step looks a lot like Pinterest, apparently.
As Fast Company describes it, Medium is “intended to be a Pinterest for our own lives, an elegant repository for photos, projects, and stories we’ve actually lived, as opposed to a re-blogged clearinghouse for pictures of wedding dresses and eggs baked into avocados found elsewhere around the Web.”
The user will post items and separate them into “collections” on a grid. Potential examples include “When I Was a Kid,” featuring childhood images and “This Happened To Me, a collection of amusing, inspiring, or unlikely real world anecdotes.”
The article discusses the pros and cons of a tile-based layout, suggesting that for Medium, the tile approach may be a great fit: “The tightly packed tiles serve to visually reinforce the idea that these photos and stories are part of a collection. If you’re flicking through a blog, a 200-word story titled ‘Beat-boxing saves lives’ probably wouldn’t grab your attention. But when it’s a tile in a collection headed ‘This Happened To Me,’ you automatically have a context that makes it a bit more compelling.”
Anyone with a Twitter account can check out Medium’s collections now, but posting is limited to a small group of beta testers.
“Much of our vision for Medium is just that — vision,” notes Stone. “Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be.”
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