Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams' Blogging Platform Medium Opens Signups To All

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has a new blogging platform called Medium, which has been a closed-signup affair since its introduction. Today, the platform sent out an email with the news that anyone can now sign in and start writing.

There are a few requirements set out for signup. You must be writing from Chrome, Safari or Firefox browsers, and you have to have a Twitter account to post. There's a verification link sent via email that you click on and then you're in.

Williams founded Odeo - the parent company of Twitter - with Noah Glass after selling his company Pyra Labs to Google. The main product of Pyra was Blogger, which was one of the early products that codified what we now know as ‘blogs'. Now, Williams is in the blogging game again.

Last month, Williams spoke to TC about his vision for Medium:

"I think more people would be in a better place if more people shared their ideas," says Williams. Seen this way, Medium is just the next logical step in Williams' three-product cycle to inject better ideas into the world. Blogger helped open the doors for pajama bloggers to compete with the media moguls. A few years later, Twitter gave the power of broadcast distribution to everyone who had 140 characters to share.

Now, to complete the circuit, Medium wants to make viral information more substantive - the hope in the Pandora's box of communication. "It's also an optimistic stance to say that we can build a system where good things can shine and get attention. And there's an audience for ideas and stories that appeal to more than just the most base desires of human beings."

I've had access to Medium for a while and haven't used it a whole lot. But I did love the overall writing experience, which is clean and quick. It feels easy to dash off a post based around an image or zip some text in and hit publish. It's definitely far lighter weight than other options like WordPress, and has a lot in common with the publishing tools offered by Dustin Curtis' Svbtle network.

If you're interested, you can sign up here.