The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium | Hacker News Reader

The Obvious Corp's preview of Medium

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Okay, I love the simplicity behind Obvious' work, but I'm seriously confused about what the purpose behind some of these projects.

Lift - http://lift.do/ - tagline is "achieve anything" - give us your email. Nothing else.

Branch - http://branch.com/ - was on HN the other day and has a pretty video, but I have no idea what they actually do as a product/service.

Medium - http://medium.com/ - despite the nice blog post, I still have no idea what they do.

Ev & co are undoubtably talented and they're working on what seems to be some cool stuff, but I feel like I've read a bunch of stuff about what they're doing and still have NO IDEA what it is they're doing.

Is this just me?

On the Lift side, try reading this blog post, Everything There Is To Know About Lift: http://blog.lift.do/post/25435255834/everything-there-is-to-...

And on the Branch side, you can try the service. It's available now and if you use it you get a pretty good sense of it. Also, try reading What is Branch Good For? http://branch.com/b/re-what-is-branch-good-for-2

It appears they are missing Jack. He was, apparently, behind the idea for Twitter, and now you can see his new venture took off and never stopped ever since. This being said, I think Branch is going to be one of the most influential products in coming years. Death to the monologues.

They are creating Twitter overlays -- new applications that attempt to leverage the Twitter social graph in clever ways.

As a tl;dr person, I just don't get the message: "We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview." is about as buzzword saturated as possible. Plus their homepage says "Your text here".

I feel every so often a designer has an urge: let's just build it and see what people use it for. It sometimes works, but mostly the user just stares at the screen until something distracts him/her, and then wanders off.

Looks interesting - to me it seems similar in a lot of ways to svbtle, at least as far as what they are trying to do.

Its a small thing, but I'm somewhat turned off by the urls - urls like https://medium.com/c/e2e5df2e6649 feel like something out of an early 2000's CMS...

http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI should be required reading for every designer, developer, and stakeholder who is involved in building any kind of product on the web.

For sure. And it's funny coming from Obvious. Twitter's traditionally one of the best examples of real-world cool URIs.

Hopefully it's just a prototype thing, but you'd think they'd want even these early URLs to be shared with love.

"Twitter's traditionally one of the best examples of real-world cool URIs."

Do you mind expanding on this? I thought hashbangs were a rape and pillage of URI convention.

Hashbangs existed for a very short period of Twitter's life. They were a mistake. They're gone now.

And Twitter is even slower...

Seriously? I found it unbearably slow until the big update a few months ago. I simply couldn't use the website. Now it's fine again.

I wasn't thinking of hashbangs, which will ultimately be noise in the history of Twitter. (I could get into a debate about why they weren't that bad, but it's all (HTML5) history now, so I'll move on.)

I was thinking mostly about the clean, namespaced, REST scheme for their API, which you can see at https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api. And it's not just a separate API, as it corresponds closely to the website URLs too.

Generally, Twitter and Digg were the best examples of real-world REST implementations around that time. That people like Oatmeal are making fun of the crazy-long Plus URIs [1] shows it's not just RFC longbeards pontificating about The Right way to build web apps. At least some end-users notice and care about this stuff too.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/12/google-plus-the-oatmeal/

This is really interesting. I don't do as much REST API work as I'd like to, and I assumed twitter's scheme was standard rather than a shining exception. Thanks for teaching me something new :)

If they're smart, they'll HTTP 301 redirect these old URLs to new ones, if they ever decide to change them.

URI design is hard, especially when you're dealing with a single namespace on a site with massive scale like Twitter. But if everyone has their own namespace (it seems Medium is a good candidate for this), then you could as well use a human-readable timestamp in UTC (yyyy/mm/dd/hh-mm-ss), but they might be an eyesore for some.

The fashion these days tends to be short, mixed-case, untypable URIs that don't look like they'll stand the test of time.

It's not a small thing: the web is made of links.

Don't really care what they look like. Not very memorable though.

I totally agree about the URLs. We decided not to launch with human readable URLs since we didn't want to deal with the namespacing issues right away. i.e. /user/post vs /collection/post vs just /post. I'm a huge fan of URLs as part of the interface, so I'm sure its something we'll implement.

Just seconding Dan's answer here, I'm a big fan of human readable URLs as well. They are on our roadmap but we didn't include them in this initial release for reasons including but limited to the namespace issues Dan mentioned.

As Ev said in his post this release is a preview and we're not done by any stretch of the imagination.

Glad to hear it! Like I said, just a small thing. I'm really excited to see where you guys go with the platform.

Understandable. Any idea when you'll be opening up the platform beyond family and friends by the way?

So I know this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but I think W3's strict URIs are only a few years from being less important for web applications and only being important for TLDs and web "sites." Reasoning: Chrome's web store and the rise of single page applications that rely on things other than URIs.

Not quite as bad as the internal links: https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fr%2F%3F...

But I actually really like the look and feel, so I've signed up. I'm sure they'll hammer the issues out.

Another walled garden?

What is the advantage of posting to this service? Increased readership? Huge font?

I don't see IP terms posted anywhere... Or any reason to be excited about this.

That's not very transparent, how would I have found that visiting the site for the first time? In fact, there is no communication to the user before asking for access to post to their twitter account. I guess the intent is to be insiders-only? Kinda mysterious?

Yep, its linked from a couple of pages but needs to be more obvious. Will fix.

Thanks - I didn't know if it was intentional. If I go to the site, the only link I have is to provide access to twitter. It does give it the feel of "somewhere I'm probably not supposed to be," which is why I was wondering if that was the intent.

Not the intent. Just trying to find the balance between UI clutter and ease of access to information. As a stop gap links have been added to a post in the "About Medium" collection: https://medium.com/c/b969ac62a46b

We'll certainly look into this more though. Thanks for raising the concerns!

I find this kind of writing a bit frustrating. Big ambitions are described concretely, while the product itself is not so clear. Perhaps I'm not a part of the target audience.

I'm unconvinced. It's a compelling story for would-be-publishers who don't want to build up an audience, but to have that you have to leverage an audience. As a reader I feel like there are many places I would go to before medium.com if I wanted to read random content.

So in simple terms what they're building is a new reddit but focused on self posts? Am I understanding that correctly?

Without comments or downvotes.

Honestly, what I'm seeing could be done with a fancy Wordpress theme. A good design does not mean you have a product.

It sounds something like that to me. I am doing something similar with hubski.com, where you essentially blog into an aggregator.

I like the pieces of what's here, but I think masonry is a bit overdone, I personally like a higher information density.

I love it. I spent quite a while on various blogs on medium.

The sorting by quality made it quite interesting.

Combine that with a recommendation system like http://getprismatic.com and it could be powerful.

I'm curious when they will open it up to more bloggers.

I signed up, and don't see how one would actually discover or browse content on medium. Aside from the links in the submitted article, it all seems like dead ends.

Is there something I'm missing?

One thing I really like on Medium is the composing experience. It's simple and beautiful. Sometimes I forget what a game changer that can be. But the Medium experience has been strong enough that I do almost all my writing there (even before you could have an audience).

ditto! i've even started to compose emails in it. rivals IA Writer.

I'd love to check this out. Are details available? Screen shots?

I suppose you can see it at https://medium.com/

Well that's where I originally looked. The commenter mentioned the composing experience, but I didn't find any details. If you coud point me to a UI demo or info, I'd appreciate it. I must be missing something. Thanks.

If you aren't signed in (or in browser private mode), and visit https://medium.com, you should see this http://cl.ly/image/3z293w0b2V0j. I don't have write access to the service either, but my guess is that's how it looks like? You can actually type, as well as replace the photo in that page. But you can't save.

Thanks. Now see it. I must have been expecting something different. Now it seems pretty obvious to me.

Looking at the response headers, the powered-by header says "Food" (x-powered-by: Food). Is this a new web framework or just a little joke?

You can read about how we chose our tech stack here: http://branch.com/b/choosing-the-best-technology-for-my-webs...

(Seriously, though, it was just the first thing that came into my head when setting up the other X-headers.)

Probably a joke. They are using Nginx, and you can easily add a custom header using the add_header directive[1] in the Nginx config.

e.g. add_header "X-Powered-By" "Food";

[1]http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpHeadersModule#add_header

I sometimes throw in these kind of headers for fun on my own sites.

So... it is a forum but posts in each thread are ordered based on upvotes instead of time, and displayed in Pinterest format?

That's what I gather from 30 minutes of an exhaustive all-links traversal, at least.

Seems like a Pinterest for words instead of pictures.

Part of me is a wannabe writer and I love the craft of writing. With that perspective, I see Blogger and Twitter as heralding two innovative new forms of writing:

Blogger (and blogging) brought about short-form personal essays; Twitter brought about ultra-short-form personal messages.

Both have spawned many other uses as well, as people made each their own. But the writer in me loved the limitations each had, since limitations often leads to creativity.

So I'm excited about what Medium could be. Looking at their examples, my guess is they're mashing together elements of Pinterest and Tumblr (and Svbtle). Perhaps they see power in making publishing more visual and flexible. A visually-appealing layout invites a reader in. And there are all kinds of writers - or better - content creators. Some are visual (hence the all-image collections), some are textual, some are a mix of both. Perhaps in the future, they'll offer video and audio too. Well, maybe not audio ;) (cough cough Odeo cough)

Will it work? I think they've got something interesting here, though I don't see a leap that's as revolutionary as Blogger or Twitter yet.

As a content creator, my main concerns are:

+ Is it easy to create? (This is perhaps the biggest concern)

+ Can I express myself in the form I want to? (In whatever format I prefer)

+ Can I be creative in my expression? (Sometimes limitations are good here)

+ Will I have an audience? (The follower system seems to work well here, as well as ways to share to other social media networks)

+ Can I hear from my audience? (Comments, likes, votes, ratings, etc; moderation and filtering is key here)

+ How can my ego be fed? (Creators may not think about this consciously, but all public creators care about their reputation, be it through audience engagement, social media metrics, etc)

Blogger, Twitter, and other social media creation tools offer these to some extent. I think part of Blogger and Twitter's success was how they enabled the first bullet point: they made creating content easy. Ridiculously easy.

The examples Medium offered only show off the final products, so I don't know anything about the creation process. Will it be ridiculously easy to use, easier than Blogger, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc? It looks very interesting, but I don't get a feeling of it being revolutionary. At least, not yet.

For a moment there I thought they were going to try and bring editors back to the publishing process. The blog gave us open publishing, anyone who wants to can push up their words. What's missing though is the polish and refinement that the editorial process gives more traditional publishing. When they started talking about choosing the level of participation I was expecting them to say that people could now choose to be editors. I'm not sure exactly how the interactions authors and editors would self-organise into useful pairings/groupings but if we cracked that I do think we'd see higher quality emerging.

Perhaps people could create their own 'zines from other people's articles. They choose the articles they like, and then refine the tone and content to form a coherent publication.

I can't fully wrap my head around it - don't have Twitter, can't try it out - by just observing the surface details but it looks like a collaborative content platform with lots of emphasis on design. Love the large format photos and responsive design.

Both Branch and Medium seems pretty exciting. I can now see why I can live with Twitter as a one-way link sharing media company. However, I can only wish that Branch would let people be in control of the environment they host for authentic conversation, i.e, they should start with tackling the issues of noise, spammers, trolls etc. Make things authentic for people so they feel trust towards conversing online.

Medium seems little confusing at first but as a new publishing platform (over Wordpress and the rest of the old not-so-evolving-anymore), I look forward to participating.

I will "me too" this as interesting. I think everyone can agree that the medium (no pun intended) for news and other written content has been in a general state of flux for the better part of two decades now. It seems like there is a new model for soliciting, curating, and distributing this content which is hard to exactly put a finger on, but we're getting closer. Efforts like this are refreshing to see, and hopefully will become something that much closer to the next "it"

Ahhh, it's a stealthy attempt to build a new Google Wave: (logo on their site) https://d233eq3e3p3cv0.cloudfront.net/fit/t/45/45/0*ojw7_5O9...

Boring. Another blogging platform with no new functionality. What makes it better than Tumblr?

Medium to me looks like something similar to svbtle.com Where svbtle.com is new blogging platform , they are considering it as Publishing platform.

The flagship kudos concept is part of Medium.com as well.

My immediate thought was, "Neat, I'm going to add this to my feed reader and see how it progresses." Followed by... "Hmm, no RSS link." (view source)... "Huh."

For anything that nice I'd probably do a Wordpress currently, but it will be interesting to see how this compares.

Feels/seems like smallest federated wiki.

And/or how the World Wide Web was intended to function.

Not suggesting otherwise, I've been eager to try a platform like this with a lot of other users.

Hmm, I remember the reaction to Twitter at launch was very much, why would I ever use? What does it do?

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