About two years ago Marc Andreessen proclaimed that software is eating the world (beware the WSJ paywall):

My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.

We’ve seen this shift toward software in the content arena too, where it’s impossible to ignore the constant stream of stories about the struggles of print media. And lately, it seems that Medium is emerging as the first major successful content platform since the shift started. It feels like every second or third link on Twitter points to a Medium post, and somehow being on Medium gives content the perception of a certain level of prestige.

Why is that? Why is this platform so successful, and why does it have such a strong brand? I don’t agree with the direct comparison and the premise that Quora vs. Medium is an actual winner-takes-all situation, but AJ Juliani makes an interesting point about this in Why Medium May Succeed Where Quora Did Not:

Medium is about stories. Quora is about answers. And people love stories. Our favorite way to learn is through stories and narrative.

Medium is certainly a great platform for reading stories, and the tools available to writers make it a great creation experience as well. But there’s also been pushback recently on Medium’s apparent dominance in the individual writer domain. The biggest concern is that we don’t know what Medium’s plans are, and that authors are therefore giving up their words to an unknown entity. Here is Glenn Fleishman in Why You Should Be Your Own Platform:

I’ve written a few things on Medium (not paid) because I liked the experience of their writing tools, their statistics, and their reach. […] But it’s not mine. It’s theirs.

I can’t control the URL. I can’t embed. I have no idea about what their ultimate plans are. They could delete all non-owned/paid content in the future with no notice. They could rework the design and it would be ugly. My words’ persistence, both in appearance and permanent location, are dependent on factors beyond my control.

Marco Arment takes this argument further in Medium and Being Your Own Platform

Treat places like Medium the way you’d treat writing for someone else’s magazine, for free. It serves the same purpose: your writing gets to appear in a semi-upscale setting and you might temporarily get more readers than you would elsewhere, but you’re giving up ownership and a lot of control to get that.

As for me, I love the writing (and reading) experience on Medium. But I do have concerns that are big enough to make me take a step back:

• Medium seems to be more about Medium than about authors. I don’t think we should move our personal blogs there — it’s already getting too crowded, and I still believe we should all own our own identities online.
• Related to the last point: the idea of organizing content around topics (collections) is great, but there is no way to follow collections easily. RSS feeds are difficult to find, and it seems the only way to see what’s new in a collection is to go to its URL. This makes me worried about a walled garden approach to the content, similar to how Twitter and Google+ restrict how you can add and extract content.
• There’s some great content being surfaced by the editorial team, but there are also a lot of duds when you dig a bit deeper into the collections. And by expanding the platform so quickly the noise is becoming louder. I’m worried Medium is quickly going to outgrow their initial focus on providing quality over quantity.

If we’ve learned anything over the past few years, it’s that we should be wary of platforms that offer large audiences at a price of admission that is not immediately apparent (See Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…).

The barrier to setting up your own site has never been lower (if you’re not into WordPress, try Scriptogr.am or Octopress). Yes, building an audience on your own platform is much harder than hoping to get picked by the Medium editorial team. But the longevity and the satisfaction you’ll get from maintaining your own voice is so much higher. Don’t give that away.

Cliff Kuang discusses wearable tech and ubiquitous computing in Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner:

In the wrong hands, this is a dystopian prospect—technology’s unwanted intrusion into our every waking moment. But without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people’s day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying. That’s where the challenge comes in. The task of making this new world can’t be left up to engineers and technologists alone—otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of. Designers, who’ve always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It’s up to them to make this new world feel like something we’ve always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have.

I’m currently travelling in the U.S., which means I can finally drag some of my favorite apps from the graveyard screen on my iPhone to the home screen. I’m now happily exploring around in Yelp and Fandango, which I haven’t been able to do in a while. Even Foursquare — which I’m already a huge fan of — is suddenly on steroids.

At the same time, there’s one part of Don Norman’s The Paradox of Wearable Technologies that I keep coming back to:

I am fully dependent upon modern technologies because they make me more powerful, not less. By taking away the dreary, unessential parts of life, I can concentrate upon the important, human aspects.

I realize that when apps work well — really well — they do just that. It’s not that they get out of the way in an invisible UI sense. They are extremely visible, and they consume all your attention while you’re using them. But they take away the boring parts of life so you can focus on the exciting bits.

I apologize in advance to those of you who live in the U.S., but please allow me to gush a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

Fandango

Buying movie tickets online is a mission in most cases. Even if you can figure out how to use the site, you’re not guaranteed that the payment gateway is going to work, and there’s often no way to save credit card details for future purchases. But before I came on this trip, I saved some movies I knew I wanted to see in the Fandango app. Once I got here, I just tapped on a movie, the app showed me nearby theatres and times, I bought a ticket using my PayPal account, and I showed my phone at the door to scan the ticket.

All the app does is take the mundane parts out of buying movie tickets — the search for a theatre, the payment, the ticketing process. It lets me focus on what I really want to be doing — watching a movie.

Foursquare

I expected Foursquare to be better in the U.S. than in South Africa, but I’m blown away by its usefulness. Here are some things that really helped along the way:

• Foursquare knows I live in Cape Town and that I check into a lot of coffee places. So when I arrived in San Diego the app told me welcome, and recommended some coffee houses nearby (a friend, who checks into a lot of Mexican restaurants, got that as her recommendations).
• After you check in somewhere, the app tells you where people are likely to go next.
• Because the data set is so huge, I find that the ratings and recommendations work much better across the board.
• For example, the time of day affects the recommendations — breakfast places in the morning, lunch places around noon, etc.

Again, this isn’t earth-shattering stuff. But it takes away just enough of the mundane parts of being in a new city to make your visit that much more enjoyable.

And that’s what good technology does. It’s not necessarily invisible, but it performs a disappearing act on the things you don’t want to do. There are certainly major, wicked problems to solve in the world. But there are also thousands of small, tedious tasks we deal with every day that we can solve with technology.

That’s what’s inspiring to me about these products, and why I’m going to pay much more attention to “small annoyances” as a way to get product ideas.

There’s so much good stuff in this responsive design interview with Brad Frost and others. I was especially interested in everyone’s thoughts on responsive frameworks. Here’s Aaron Gustafson‘s answer:

I find Foundation, Bootstrap, and similar frameworks interesting from an educational standpoint, but I would never use one when building a production site. For prototyping a concept, sure, but to take one of these into production you need to be rigorous in your removal of unused CSS and JavaScript or you end up creating a heavy, slow experience for you users. I also think you need to work twice as hard to break out of the theme of the framework. There are a ton of Bootstrap sites out there that look like Bootstrap sites. Your design should be as unique as your product, not some off the shelf thing you just changed some colors on.

Agreed.

Ben Thompson’s stratēchery has become one of my favorite sites. His insight into the tech world gives me a new perspective with every post. Recently he discussed what makes the Facebook app so compelling in Mobile Makes Facebook Just an App; That’s Great News:

Brand advertising on Facebook’s app shares the screen with no one. Thanks to the constraints of mobile, Facebook may be cracking the display and brand advertising nut that has frustrated online advertisers for years. […]

[Facebook] is the most indispensable tech product in most people’s lives, and every time one of those billion people use the mobile app, they see an advertisement that completely owns their device’s screen, if only for a moment.

“Ads in users’ faces” is certainly a great sell to advertisers, but I do wonder how far they can push it before people feel like their entire feed is taken over by advertising, and there’s just not enough content from their friends any more.

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The idea that we allow too many distractions to take our focus off the work we’re supposed to be doing is not new. And the solution — just turn things off! — is not rocket science either. But I find it interesting just how many blog posts we’ve seen about this topic over the past couple of years. Working in the Shed by Matt Gemmell is another really good one:

We act as if we take concentration for granted, yet everyone has had trouble keeping their mind on the task at hand. We litter our menubars with icons, keep notifications enabled, and run our email programs, chat apps and social media clients all day. Something’s got to give, and invariably it’s our creative output.

Seth Godin just published another very weird post¹ called What works for websites today? He makes a couple of claims that, to me, show what the biggest problem with Marketing is today. I’ll get back to that, but first… Seth says:

[An] effective website is created by someone who knows what she wants the user to do.

No. An effective website is created by someone who knows what users want to do. And she uses that knowledge to build something useful that is also easy and enjoyable to use.

He continues:

The only reason to build a website is to change someone.

Wait, what? No! We have a name for that. It’s called persuasive design, or at the far end of the spectrum, dark patterns.

No, the only reason to build a website is to enable people to do what they want to do.

Good user experience has both good utility (it fills a customer need) and good usability (it’s easy to use). The problem with many Marketers today is that they too often make it all about the company, and not about user needs. I’m sorry, but it’s not about changing people, and it’s not about making them do stuff. That’s old school thinking from a time when brands could steamroll their way into the consciousness and wallets of people through clever advertising and sleight of hand. Those days are over. Now our job is not to make it about how awesome we are, but how well we help people accomplish their goals.

Let’s respect our users and their needs. Let’s not treat them like puppets that need to be controlled.