By Dan Satherley
The brains behind Twitter and Blogger have unveiled their latest web publishing platform – Medium.
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger, and Biz Stone, who helped set up Twitter, say Medium is "an attempt to make an evolutionary leap, based on everything we've learned in the last 13 years and the needs of today's world".
"Compared to 1999, the Internet has come a long way," Williams wrote in a blog entry on the site. "It has gone from theoretically to actually central to how many of us live and work."
Williams says since 1999, "lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced".
Medium takes aspects of several existing blogging and social media platforms, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Blogger, Tumblr and of course, Twitter. Posts can be organised into "collections", much like Pinterest, and readers can upvote posts they like, as they do on Reddit.
Collections can be opened up so anyone can publish to them, like this one of old photographs, or closed to just approved posters, like a traditional blog.
Williams admits Medium is a work in progress.
"When you consider we’ve been publishing on paper for over 500 years and on the Internet for only a couple decades, it’s no surprise we haven’t figured it all out. It’s still early days."
At the moment, you can read and give feedback on Medium posts if you have a Twitter account. Posting at this early stage is limited to Twitter insiders, but will be expanded "rapidly" in the near future.
3 News