What Medium’s latest product launch means for its future as a platform

Already when Medium launched its new quick-compose feature right above the stream a while ago I had the sense that the team may be in the middle of broadening their aspirations regarding the to be published pieces on the platform. Until then you mostly discovered rather long-form reads on Medium which took a deep dive into topics. But now also quick-mindset postings right after you logged in were strongly encouraged.

It almost felt like intentional that they also didn’t allowed mobile publishing for a long time, neither from their native apps nor the within the mobile web experience. But at least since the latest update which should have hit your device this evening by now, it really feels like Medium turns into something like a Twitter-style communication platform. Just without character limitation and with more focus on the writing experience. With the long anticipated writing feature coming to the native iOS apps, Medium fills a large gap that has been a big hurdle for a lot of spontaneous driven authors.

I’m curious to see what their next steps will be but I’m pretty confident that we’re about to see further product launches focussing on micro and mobile publishing.