Recent studies claim that 1,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared each day on Facebook alone, bolstering the Gen Y notion that "I am what I share." Indeed, single-serving publishers like Twitter and Facebook are now considered members of the digital establishment, while the more visually-oriented Tumblr and Pinterest have arisen as necessary complements. Meanwhile,
social startups designed to fulfill emerging consumer needs continue to materialize amid an ever-evolving social web.
Medium: Between Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress, and virtually hundreds of other platforms vying for users, online publishing is a saturated category. Despite this, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are expanding their mission of bringing the “
democratization of information” to the masses by launching a collaborative publishing platform called
Medium. Built from scratch by idea incubator
The Obvious Corporation, the site is a joy to navigate, but the real highlight is the user experience, which is as elegant as it is easy. There are ready-made themes and templates in place, and the design, a
mix of Pinterest and Reddit, is sleek and intuitive.
Mural.ly:
Mural.ly, an Argentinian startup conceived to offer users a social ideation hub, boasts a “flexible content format that aggregates media and files.” Visually, the site looks like the sort of pinboard one might find above an office desk, but with one major difference: It artfully arranges images, digital posts-its, and other information in an elastic format that users can save and seamlessly share with friends, colleagues, and their social networks. The
Prezi-style concept is similar to
Pinterest, except that it allows for mixing images and text in one sphere and embraces the crowdsourcing culture of the web. And, as its name implies, users can scroll not only vertically but also horizontally.
Tackk: Similar to Mural.ly,
Tackk is a new-school riff on the retro bulletin board. The founders—both of whom possess backgrounds in design, which is immediately apparent—saw a need for a place to share the kind of single-use content that can often be found tacked to a coffee shop wall. The half-design, half-publishing platform fills a gap between transient publishers like Twitter and Tumblr and more fixed outlets like Blogger. Specializing in "e-fliers," Tackk makes it effortless to create and share information online, whether users are
hosting open houses or
throwing parties. Best of all, the tools are simple and there’s no login required.
