Medium was launched today. This is yet another project of Obvious Corp. In case you’re not familiar with Obvious, this is mother company for Twitter and some other products.
Medium is not fully opened to public. Although you could log into with a Twitter account, you cannot post anything yet. All you can do is to read (or explore) collections provided. You can choose to vote by clicking This is good link at end of each post.
Evan Williams mentioned in the welcome message of Medium that “All posts are organized into collections, which are defined by a theme and a template.” In an actual collection, I can find some key features familiar to that from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Digg. It may not be accurate due to very limited exploration. This is my first impression. But I have a strong feeling right now that Medium is another Twitter with more sophisticated interface design and more natural multimedia support.
In Evan’s theory, Blogger.com and Twitter.com “lowered the bar for sharing information”. Yet the quality is poor. I totally agree with that. But this is so natural. If you lower the bar, the number will rise and quality will go down. With Medium, Evan wants to do something. The “hand-pick” collections is his solution.
I’m not an expert of sociology, I cannot foresee what’s going to happen. However, it’s a cool project. After running twitter for more than five years, Obvious is now a bigger company. With the experiences, Medium is more likely a successful project.
Medium could be the next place to get news update, with high quality journalism.