I just finished reading “Hatching Twitter” — a book about the founders of Twitter. I learned about Ev Williams and Blogger (a company he founded and sold to Google) and Twitter. I was interested as to why he would start a 3rd company called medium. I asked questions like:

• I already have a blog, why do I need to go to a central place to blog?
• Didn’t he create blogger so that people can create their own blogs already, whats different about this?

After some more thought (and almost no one reading my existing blog alighafour.com) I saw two advantages to Medium

1. There is already a community of bloggers that has the opportunity to see your content (as opposed to people finding it really only through search, or when you tweet/post on linked in)
2. It is really really easy to add content and photos (Wordpress is pretty easy as well — I did take computer science after all, it would be a shame if I could not install Wordpress!) But its easy on a few other fronts other than technology. No upgrades, no plugins, no hacking (hopefully!), easy to add photos, formatting is simple.

It is still in its early stages and I am sure it will improve. As co-founder of @viafoura (A software company that is run on publisher and brand sites that encourages user participation to add to the story, i.e. through commenting). I think there is still a lot left to be desired on this front. I take a great interest (and as our stats show, lots of other people do as well) in seeing other peoples reactions to content.

The world does work in interesting ways…