A New Addition to the Online Social Experience

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to an idea about our online interactions that is relevant to each one of us, but is something that is so “everyday”, and such a common occurrence in our day-to-day digital experiences, that we don’t consciously acknowledge it. That idea, or theory, is that when we write an e-mail, “like” a photo on Facebook, reply to a Tweet, share a YouTube video, or Re-Blog a writing from WordPress, we’re contributing to a living, growing media ecosystem. We’ve all used the aforementioned media creation tools or at least something similar, but are we ready for another one on our hands? Don’t swear anything off just yet, because Evan Williams and Biz Stone (the guys behind Twitter) announced their new site will open to the public in early 2013.

Medium’s Homepage – Still under construction

Their new site is called Medium, and upon initially reading the description, it comes off very similar to that of WordPress. But Medium is more than that. Williams describes Medium as a “collaborative publishing platform”, and despite its singular title, will feature multimedia content from blogs and texts to photos and videos. Williams believes the future of digital media consumption will come through social networks and platforms, as opposed to individual websites.

What separates Medium from its various social media sharing counterparts such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the like is that Medium’s homepage will yield the top content across the site at the top of the page, and the less popular content at the bottom of the page. Think of Google’s search result list – Most popular sites at the top, with the less popular sites at the bottom of the site.

Medium still has a few months to finalize the site, but in the meantime, it will be exciting to see if Medium releases a tablet and mobile application to accompany the release of the site. With more and more people contributing to the media ecosystem from mobile and tablet devices, Medium may have a better chance at initially capturing a larger audience.

Semester-Long Twitter Wrap Up

Difficult to believe that it was the beginning of September when I first posted about the three new additions to my “Following” list on Twitter. Well, my list has expanded since then… From WSJ Tech Columnsit Walt Mossberg, Founder and CEO of Mashable Pete Cashmore, and Lead Technology Reporter for The New York Times “Bits Blog”, Nick Bilton… My @sprentice28/media list now follows @rdio, online music streaming service based in San Francisco, California, @mashablesocialmedia – The Twitter account for all of Mashable’s news on social media, @sparker – The Twitter account for Sean Parker, founder of Napster and investor of Facebook and Spotify, @turntablefm – The Twitter account for Turntable.fm, which is an up and coming platform where users can play music from their personal collections for other users in chatroom-style rooms, @mashableapple, @mashableentertain, and @cnntech.

It’s been challenging to stay up to date with each Twitter account, my hand was forced to make a list once I began following over 400 different accounts. If there is one thing I learned from this experience, it’s that all technology/media changes at an unimaginable rate… Or that’s what it seemed like to me! Mashable’s Twitter accounts in particular were constantly inundating my Twitter Timeline with Tweets ranging from “Why Businesses Should Adopt A Multi-Channel Messaging Strategy” to “Online Piracy Act: Would It Help Business or Kill Innovation?”. The rate at which the Tweets would come in was simply overwhelming, and more often than not, I would find myself adding certain Tweets to my “favorites” so I could read them in depth later on in the day. Rdio and Turntable.fm’s Twitter accounts that I took an active interest in. Both accounts were used not only for self-promotion, but also used regularly to keep in touch with users and musicians. Rdio would tweet about new music added to the public collection, such as Ryan Stout’s debut comedy while Turntable.fm would communicate with up and coming musicians planning to play their personal music in the chatrooms for other audiences.

While companies like Mashable and CNN Tech have already established themselves as legitimate, credible sources for news and information, Twitter is an ideal medium to quickly share and spread news to millions and millions of people. However, companies like Turntable.fm and Rdio see Twitter as a platform to increase the visibility of their brand and actually create a name for themselves – And why not over Twitter? It’s free, it’s quick, and within seconds, you can reach nearly half a billion people.

First Post – 8/31/2011

For “iCom 101: The Digital Word” course, I am maintaing a blog where I can post assignments and share my opinion on topics given in class. I recently had to follow a few leaders in the digital world on Twitter… As a regular Tweeter, this was no problem for me. The individuals I followed are as follows…

Walt Mossberg – (@waltmossberg) – Creator of the weekly Personal Technology column in the The Wall Street Journal. He also operates his website, allthingsd.com where he shares his opinion on technology.

Pete Cashmore – (@mashable) – Founder and CEO of Mashable, the most popular website for digital, social media, and technology news.

Nick Bilton – (@nickbilton) – Lead Technology Reporter for The New York Times “Bits Blog”.

If you’re interested in following more technology/media related people/sites on Twitter, I recommend Chris Anderson (@TEDchris), who is the curator for the TED conference and Tweets articles relating to technology as well as technology-related TED talks. CNN Tech News (@cnntech) is another page worth following if interested in staying up to date and reading stories about technology.

Until next time,

Stuart