Is Medium Mediocre?

Some minutes ago, the incredible guys at Obvious Corp. announced the launch of their newest project, Medium.

Immediately, I read Ev William’s opening piece explaining the reasoning behind the idea. I then chased down my friends at Obvious for a first-class invite into the special project (I’m still waiting Geoff and Dann…). But I digress.

In William’s article, he made many points which I found hard to disagree with. One such point:

Still, some things haven’t evolved as much as we would have expected. Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others. And in many ways, the web is still mimicking print concepts, while not even catching up to it in terms of layout, design, and clarity of experience.

But then I thought to myself, isn’t that what Dustin Curtis had hoped to achieve with his invite-only Svbtle network?

An invite-only network of people who strive to produce great content. We focus on the writing, the news, and the ideas. Everything else is a distraction.

Not to mention, Curtis pretty much nailed the “layout, design, and clarity of experience,” too.

If so, then the question arises what’s the difference between Svbtle and Medium? And which one is better, more thought out, etc.?

Is Medium just “Blogger 2.0?” Or is it the perfect mashup between Pinterest, Tumblr, and Svbtle? Is it another Hacker News with the voting feature?

Is it… mediocre?

While I can only speculate at this point, primarily because I’m not in the thing yet (I’m still waiting Geoff and/or Dann), I can say for certain that the web’s bar on quality has been lowered significantly and it’s the duty of those who truly love the web to raise it once again. I commend Obvious and Curtis for their efforts, and I too “believe publishing—and media, more broadly—is important.”

Now it’s time to see which service does what.