Ev Williams the serial entrepreneur, behind projects such as Twitter & Blogger has just released the first wave of invites to Medium, a brand new platform for sharing content. When you land on the Medium homepage you’re greeted with the message “we’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch”. It almost sounds as though Medium is to be a competitor for WordPress, however dig a little deeper and you’ll see that the idea has some big differences.
So how does this new tool actually work and differ from existing service?
Below is the official explanation from the team at Medium
Medium is 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—and that’s great. If they choose, they can recommend content to others, giving feedback to the creator and increasing the likelihood others will see it.
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 the arduous task of developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme. (For example, this post is in the ‘About Medium’ collection.)
Eventually, anyone will be able to create a collection about anything, and collections can be invite only (like this one) or open to contributions from anyone. For example, here’s an open collection of crazy stories. Posts can also be “cross-posted” to multiple collections, which gives more opportunity for discovery and building one idea off of another.
Here you can see the default landing page once logged in, full of random posts, posts which will alter when you begin to make collections and recommend certain posts.
This is the collection interface where you can see the different types, each containing relative content.
In it’s very early stages, Medium is certainly a hot new platform to keep tabs on, something which we hope to covering as it grows.
