
The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium - bitsweet
https://medium.com/p/9e53ca408c48
======
joelrunyon
Okay, 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/> \- tagline is "achieve anything" - give us your
email. Nothing else.

Branch - <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/> \- 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
On 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-...](http://blog.lift.do/post/25435255834/everything-there-is-to-know-
about-lift)

~~~
tonystubblebine
And 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>

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rjsamson
Looks 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> feel like something out of an early 2000's
CMS...

~~~
dpup
I totally agree about the URLs. We decided not to launch with human readable
URLs since we didn't want to deal with the namespacing issues right away. i.e.
/user/post vs /collection/post vs just /post. I'm a huge fan of URLs as part
of the interface, so I'm sure its something we'll implement.

~~~
don_neufeld
Just seconding Dan's answer here, I'm a big fan of human readable URLs as
well. They are on our roadmap but we didn't include them in this initial
release for reasons including but limited to the namespace issues Dan
mentioned.

As Ev said in his post this release is a preview and we're not done by any
stretch of the imagination.

~~~
rjsamson
Glad to hear it! Like I said, just a small thing. I'm really excited to see
where you guys go with the platform.

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sunspeck
Another 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
Terms of Service: <https://medium.com/c/675ebe56ac25>

~~~
drone
That'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
Yep, its linked from a couple of pages but needs to be more obvious. Will fix.

~~~
drone
Thanks - 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
Not 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>

We'll certainly look into this more though. Thanks for raising the concerns!

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state
I 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.

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austenallred
I'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.

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citricsquid
So in simple terms what they're building is a new reddit but focused on self
posts? Am I understanding that correctly?

~~~
timdorr
Without 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.

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dmix
I 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> and
it could be powerful.

I'm curious when they will open it up to more bloggers.

~~~
cag_ii
I 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?

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tonystubblebine
One 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).

~~~
8ig8
I'd love to check this out. Are details available? Screen shots?

~~~
hboon
I suppose you can see it at <https://medium.com/>

~~~
8ig8
Well 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
If you aren't signed in (or in browser private mode), and visit
<https://medium.com>, you should see this <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
Thanks. Now see it. I must have been expecting something different. Now it
seems pretty obvious to me.

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wikyd
Looking 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?

~~~
chr15
Probably 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>

I sometimes throw in these kind of headers for fun on my own sites.

------
karpathy
So... 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.

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SimianLogic2
Seems like a Pinterest for words instead of pictures.

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mikeleeorg
Part 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.

------
ollysb
For 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.

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arkitaip
I 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.

------
webwanderings
Both 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.

------
greghinch
I 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"

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iswaveupyet
Ahhh, 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_5O9...](https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/45/45/0*ojw7_5O9gJL7Ik75572zzO0OITA*.png)

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dreamdu5t
Boring. Another blogging platform with no new functionality. What makes it
better than Tumblr?

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desaiguddu
Medium 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.

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cdmoyer
My 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."

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guscost
For anything that nice I'd probably do a Wordpress currently, but it will be
interesting to see how this compares.

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irunbackwards
Feels/seems like smallest federated wiki.

~~~
tbeseda
And/or how the World Wide Web was intended to function.

~~~
irunbackwards
Not suggesting otherwise, I've been eager to try a platform like this with a
lot of other users.

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kul
Hmm, I remember the reaction to Twitter at launch was very much, why would I
ever use? What does it do?

