Can Medium Compete with Tumblr and Twitter?

Between platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest, is there really space in the market for Medium?

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n the microblogging and photo-sharing universe, there are plenty of platforms to share your content. Between Twitter and Tumblr, most of your needs can be met—Twitter allows photo posting as well as short-form text posting (up to 140 characters), while Tumblr allows not only photo and text posts, but video, audio, links, and chat logs. Between the two sites, it's hard to imagine people would want to join another one, but in case they do, there's Medium.

Medium is only in beta right now, but after a full launch, users will be able to post photos to "collections," or groups of related photos (for example, one collection is called "Been There. Loved That." and it's a collection of users' travel photos, and another is called "Look What I Made," which is pretty self-explanatory). But does the world really need Medium?  Maybe not.

Medium organizes collections of photos by category/topic, like this one.

But Evan Williams, the creator of Medium, isn't new to people dismissing his ideas as unnecessary. When he created Blogger, people thought it was only for nerds who blogged. Back then, that group was small; nowadays, everyone and their mom (literally) has a blog. Now, blogging is taken for granted, but in 1999 when Blogger first started, the idea seemed revolutionary. Could the same be said for Medium?

Williams says that Medium represents only "a sliver" of what he and his team have learned about publishing and how it needs to be reinvented.

"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," he said.

But isn't that what Pinterest is for? Again, the concept seems a little overdone to us.

We'll have to wait and see what happens once the website becomes usable for the general public, but for now, we're kind of skeptical.