Hello Medium
It’s harder to find words to describe my amazement with the simplicity and ambitiousness of Medium. So I would start from my dis-satisfaction with other online publishing tools.
Blogger: Outdated interface and user experience, too many options, which reminds me of MS Office, or Google Docs, but blogging should be simpler than that. Many official themes, none of them good. Compared to Medium, no nice way to discover relevant content from other people. Technocrati tags, anyone? Medium’s Collection solved that problem elegantly. Was the Medium of the 90s? Created by Ev Williams also. Not a coincidence apparently. Now on to his next work:
Twitter: Short and realtime, still essential for follow the latest events and direct conversations, not created for long-form content.
Facebook: Based on one’s social graph, who cares about people that you happens to grow up with? I do. That’s the only reason I use it. Content is created for them, it’s intimate, emotional, personal, and private. I’m reluctant to pollute my timeline with content about coding or design, since they are just my social circle.
Tumblr: Another sensible option, your content could be divided into several blogs, you dump your content, only people who are interested in the topics or tags will find your content. You talk to an invisible audience. It’s almost fun. It’s only fun? Not designed for long-form content creation. Its interface is optimized for quick, short, and random content dumps.
Why I like Medium
Killer editing experience: This is my first post. I finished it in fullscreen mode, without any distraction. Saving is automatic. When you are typing, even the logo will disappear. There is no toolbar, no chrome, no borders that distracts. It gets the writing process right. If you don’t want to publish now, it will be automatically saved as draft. You can even share your draft privately to others for comments before publish. Its editing experience is even better than iA Writer in my opinion, which some would argue is the best editor around.
Collection: An awesome way to share content. Just this last week, I was thinking about creating a wiki-like tool where anyone could write about any topic, but unlike a Wikipedia, your edit won’t be lost in other people’s edit, your post will be in one piece, and people could upvote your post if yours makes the best sense. Now I discovered Medium, it’s almost that, only better.
Killer reading experience: I’ve been a long time reader of Medium before this rediscovery of its platform when I finally register. My criteria as a reader is really basic: type, font size, line height, line width, and hierarchy. I’ve enjoyed my reading experience so far. One of the delight thing is Medium even remembers the reading position of a post, next time I’m on the same post I could resume from where I left off! And I haven’t even used the recommended Reading List yet. Would that also solve the long form content consumption problem?
Inline commenting: I haven’t used this yet either. But this is interesting, and rare, not to be compared with Diigo.
