I just spent a few minutes playing around with Medium, a new "system for reading and writing", created by the makers behind great services like Blogger and Twitter.
It was extremely validating to see that some of the decisions that were made by the amazingly smart and talented Medium team ended up being some of the same decisions we made with Barley. We only have three people (soon to be five) and yet we’re tackling a problem as big or bigger than Medium is.
Barley is nothing like Medium. Barley is a platform for hosting beautiful, responsive websites with an amazingly easy content editor built on top. It hopes to help small businesses, bloggers, photographers, event organizers – just about anyone – to never touch HTML again. To get back to what they love doing; cooking, running their business, writing, or spending time with their children. Medium is a curated online magazine that is quite simply the easiest way to write articles on the web. I hope that if Medium ever allows content to be submitted to it through other applications that Barley is able to do so.
As we said on Plain Text, the blog of our team Plain, Writing on the Web is Changing. You will begin to see more and more platforms and systems like Barley and Medium begin to remove the need for complex admins and knowledge of HTML or CSS. These platforms will be the future of publishing on the web from computers and mobile devices. Barley will only be one of many of these platforms and we’re excited to see this change on the web as it grows and slowly cuts off the circulation of the older, mundane, and difficult-to-use CMSs we see today.
Medium and Barley are just the beginning.