Presenting… MEDIUM!!!
Welcome to the love child created by the makers of Blogger and Twitter. I think we all can agree that with “advances” being made to Facebook and Twitter, sometimes it feels more like a setback or an unnecessary, reinvention of the wheel. “Things seemed so perfect and now everything is different and I DON’T LIKE IT!!!!” In the past week, I’ve seen at least 30 different people post something along the lines of this because they were switched to Facebook’s Timeline without their consent (accept they did consent by agreeing to facebook’s terms and conditions (which pretty much says that those sites can do whatever the hell they please, whenever they please)).
On top of new version rollouts, it seems the overwhelmingly interpersonal platforms that Twitter and Facebook have become, mostly expose you to watch friends/followers’ squabbling, massive amounts of complaining, attention paid to the most uneducated posts because a provacative/attractive picture is delivering the message, or massive “like/RT” campaigns that equate to people sending you chain emails requiring you to send it to 20 other people or you’ll have 45 years of bad luck. It’s rare you catch anything truly important to everyday life and if you try to search it, it’s like diving into a swamp and wishing you could see an inch in front of your face. Have you ever tried to search a hash tag? It’s so painful, the military could use it as torture.
What if that could change? What if people took a social media site serious for once instead of dumping all their trash and dirty laundry into it? What if people would strive to encourage important, intelligent, intellectual, entertaining, unique, helpful, savvy, information to be unified into a community-based arena? You would get content-based social networking.
Medium is brand new and doesn’t have a ton to show, yet they do have SOME things to demo out. I applaud Medium for admitting they don’t know where they are going with it, 100%. They seem to give things a different spin by calling what we know as posts, publishings. They want to reinvent the perception and usage of articles, updates, pictures and videos. They have a direction in mind and are open-ended to developing the site in a way that continues to give it a great look, a friendly feel, and display information based on its community-determined, quality of importance. The home page doesn’t give you any idea how it will look when you sign in. There’s no signs of how one will navigate it. Is there an interactive portion beyond the click to say that you think something is important? Not sure. Is there a way to signify that you think a particular piece of information is unimportant or the equivalent of spam? I hope so. There’s no telling how something that is extremely important to one person will be easily found if its made out to be unimportant to the masses. There’s a lot of questions left unanswered.
From what we are shown, Medium organizes its information via “collections”. Collections are comprised of themes, which is pretty much the title you give it (I think), and template, which seems to be whether its a simple article, a picture, a status update (if these are even included), a video, etc. It sounds a lot like tumblr except without all the chaos… that’s also me giving it a lot of credit without seeing a finished product–Please don’t be chaotic, Medium. It seems like a huge undertaking to somehow try to intelligently deliver every different form of media, based on public views of importance, and not have it turn out as a site with the most mindless material always on top. It’s hard to fight what pop culture is, but humanity is as dumb as its ever been, which is such a sad statement to make considering how technologically savvy most of us are now. I would love to see this fight against that nauseating norm,
Here’s what we can see…
This is an example of what a collection of what simple articles about crazy stories that happened to “me” is currently designed like. (how these are all decidedly collected into this collection, I’m not sure…) :
Very important, notice the green targets with numbers to their left in the lower right hand corners of the publications. Those are the publication ratings that I assume span from 1-10, 1 being least important and 10 being the most. Also notice you can sort the publications at the top. It’s currently sorted by whats rated most interesting, but you can also sort by what is newest in the collection.
Here is what a simple article looks like once the user has chosen to open it up:
There are plenty of questions I have left as well as suggestions I have for the site. This entire idea is gigantic. It has the most potential I have seen from a social networking site, post Facebook and Twitter. Google+ is absolutely pointless as a social app. Google should thank their lucky stars it’s accompanied with entire +suite of usefulness or else it would just be a search engine and a lot of wasted time.
The important thing to take away from this, or what I hope people will take away from this is… this is the first time a site of this magnitude has been created to share information based on the public view of importance and quality. I almost wish they could make users take an aptitude test so that we could all be spared the boneheads that will only want to post things from Tosh.0 and Jersey Shore, etc… This could be interesting and intelligent from front to back and hopefully much less vain and egotistical. There’s no way to stop it all, but in a perfect world, I would have a place like this to go and never have to be angry at the internet and its moronic users that overwhelmingly make me a minority, because every other post I see says “swag” and “yolo” in it, whereas I very much value people not violently raping the English language as they currently do, daily.
I can’t wait to see how this site develops. I’ll keep you posted with what I experience as I watch it evolve and massively open up to the public.
