Evan Williams, the co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, has created another place to publish text. Medium – simpler than Blogger and lengthier than Twitter.

You will be greeted with a very simple, intuitive, and attractive homepage when you visit Medium.com for the first time. You will be amazed seeing how clutter free it is and how fun is it to look around in the website. You will see headlines, and teaser texts of some posts, along with names and profile photos of some people, presumably authors of those posts. This must be some kind of group blog with a really nice theme, you might think.

Yes and No. Yes, this is hub where various people write various posts. No, this is not a regular group blog with a very clean theme. This is the next creation of Evan Williams, the co-founder of Blogger and Twitter. Evan Williams was one of the co-founders of Pyra Labs, which launched Blogger in 1999, and then was acquired by Google in 2003. He then Co-founded Twitter in 2006.

If you’re interested to read more about him and his projects, I recommend reading his Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Williams_(entrepreneur)

Anyway, Medium is currently only available to early adopters. But I was able to get an invite to try out the site. I wrote about how I got the invitation to write in Medium, in post in Medium: https://medium.com/unforgettable-moments/6a41805854c8

They’ll be opening the site for general public next year, according to Wikipedia. However, here is how I see it now:

In the homepage, you are presented with a long list of very worthwhile posts. Medium display an approximate time on how long would the post take to be read under the title of the post, along with the name of the author.

There aren’t categories in Medium, there are “Collections”. When you write a post, you can put it into one of the available collections, or you can create your own. Most popular collections are displayed in https://medium.com/collections.

By going inside any of these collections, you can see all the posts that were put into there by their authors.

There isn’t the traditional comment box at the end of every post, but you can click the “speech bubble with the plus mark” that appears when you hover a paragraph, and then type your “Note” in the space that appears.

Author of the post will see the notes you leave, and they can reply you. If they wish, they can make your note visible to the public too.

The writing area is even more minimal.

You can only use an image as the “Feature Image” of your post, that will be displayed above your actual post. There isn’t any text formatting toolbar either. You’ll get a very minimal popup with couple of options when you select a text.

(I tried several times to take a screenshot of the popup. But that goes hidden when the Print Screen Key is pressed. So I had to take a picture of the screen with my phone. Feeling so stupid, LOL.)

Anyway, those are the basics about Medium. There aren’t any “social networking” features like “following” or “friending”, at least yet. But we have to keep in mind that it is still a work in progress.

You can sign up now to read posts in Medium. But you’ll have to wait until they offer writing access to you before you can start writing. That is unless someone with writing access is willing to get you inside, following the steps in this guide: https://medium.com/about/8304190661d4

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You can find me in Medium here: https://medium.com/@budhajeewa. I love Medium because of the quality and the worthiness of the posts people write in Medium. I don’t know how would that be preserved once it is open to the public. What do you think? Share in the comments area below. 🙂