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?

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...

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.

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?

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.

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).

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?

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"

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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.

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