Twitter is kind of a big deal, right? After all it’s worth billions of dollars and such. So if the founders of Twitter started a new company you’d probably think it’s got a reasonable chance of being successful, right? Might be something worth checking out? Well, their new thing, amongst others, is Medium. Aside from being a great name and the company having done a great job with the branding and design of the site, it’s also an interesting site. Right now it’s operating on an invite only basis, although you can invite yourself, as I did. They approved me, and I tried it out today, writing my first post.
My initial thoughts are that the interface is very easy to use. It’s a pleasure to write with it. It makes blogging about as easy as possible, as long as you’re inclined to keep things simple, which I am. And it has some great content on the site, yours truly notwithstanding.
But where is this going? The founders ask “…how do we increase the depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages great ideas coming from anywhere?” and then answer “In short, we think that words (still) matter, so we built a better system for sharing them.”
So is it just twitter without a limit on characters? Is it tumblr all over again? Will it succeed because it’s the right technology designed the right way at the right time, or because it’s all that plus it’s from the founders of Twitter? I don’t know that I would be interested in it except that it is of general interest. I posted about two hours ago and have had 13 reads. Nothing huge there, so it’s not as though it’s giving me a ton of exposure. At the moment there is something to be said for it being exclusive, so it’s kind of fun to be able to say I’m posting on Medium, but once everyone is allowed to post there will there be any compelling motivation to do so, rather than to keep my posts here on my blog? Maybe I’ll get some exposure there that I wouldn’t get otherwise, so perhaps I should dedicate 10% of my posts to Medium rather than to my own blog.
In short, I don’t know where Medium is going. I love everything about the site, except that I’m not sure why I should use it. If I were an investor being asked to consider putting money into it, I would invest in the team even though I have no clue about the product. At the moment I’m exercising faith that somehow it will be as compelling for people as Twitter has been, so I’ll keep posting on it. If you’ve got ideas about where Medium will go, please chime in.
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