There’s a new publishing platform in town. It might beat the pants off wordpress, blogger, typepad, pinterest, and tumblr. It’s called “Medium” and it’s by a twitter co-founder.
They state, “We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview.”
I’m really happy that Medium is doing two of the things I stated social media needs to start doing in the next two years.
1) Pick the best.
2) Categories.
Medium emphasizes how authors must post to a “collection” and the best-rated stories show up at the top. Thus fulfilling my two requirements for how social media must improve. Let’s go a bit deeper into the potential with categories, or as Medium calls them, “collections.”
I’m assuming that Medium will allow readers to subscribe to specific collections. Much like how you can subscribe to specific pinterest boards. However where pinterest fails, I hope Medium succeeds. With Pinterest, all your subscribed boards get put into one mashed-up feed. BLAH! There are days where I want to see just art boards. Or just decorating boards.
Medium better allow people to categorize the subscribed “collections” into groups. Otherwise, like pinteresting, reading will be a mess.
UPDATE: Huge realization. I left it in the comments section. I will mostly likely not be participating in Medium if what I understand is true.
I was just told that Medium is a system where you submit your story to ONE POOL with a specific topic. It’s not your pool. It’s the public’s pool. And when you click on your author name in your story, it only goes to your twitter account.
So basically this is like the Huffington Post, only you don’t get a page with all your writings. No personal brand for yourself. Instead it looks like one publisher trying to grab user-generated content from other people and not giving full credit.