It is too early to tell, but Obvious Corporation, the company that founded Twitter, may be on to the next big thing in social sharing platforms. Medium.com takes a different approach when it comes to publishing media content such as photos and stories. Instead of merely anchoring the content to each contributor like websites such as Flickr, photos and other posts are organized into user-created collections that are centered on themes such as “Been There. Loved That – Places That Need to Be Shared with the World” or “This Happened to Me – Life is Made of Stories.”
Inside each collection the media is sorted by user ratings.
Clicking on one of the posts brings up a full version of that photo or article.
In a way, Medium.com seems to be a hybrid of Pinterest and 500px. Just like Pinterest, the content is organized into categories or themes, and just like 500px, users can vote up the higher quality posts. You can even browse new content within each theme.
Currently, Medium is in its preview phase, which means that only a portion of the site is available to the public, and contributors are on an invite-only basis. It is still a work-in-progress, but the potential for something big is there.
Here is how the Twitter co-founder Evan Williams describes the service:
The Obvious Corporation decided to take on the project of building a new publishing platform from scratch, not just because it’s in our wheelhouse, but because we believe publishing—and media, more broadly—is important.
So, we’re re-imagining publishing in 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.
Medium is designed to allow people to choose the level of contribution they prefer. We know that most people, most of the time, will simply read and view content, which is fine. If they choose, they can click to indicate whether they think something is good, giving feedback to the creator and increasing the likelihood others will see it.
Posting on Medium (not yet open to everyone) is elegant and easy, and you can do so without the burden of becoming a blogger or worrying about developing an audience. All posts are organized into “collections,” which are defined by a theme and a template.
Collections give people context and structure to publish their own stories, photos, and ideas. By default, the highest-rated posts show up at the top, helping people get the most out of their time in this world of infinite information.Together, the contributions of many add up to create compelling and useful experiences. You may be inspired to post one time or several times a day—either way is okay. If you’re more ambitious, you might create a collection of your own.
So what do you think? Is this a fresh way to share your photographs or merely a 500px variant with categories?
More importantly, how can you take advantage of this approach to better promote yourself as a photographer?
Thanks to Peta Pixel for the link
