Medium seems to be building a tool to save and reformat online articles for future reading.Thats according to Jane Manchun Wong, a reliable source of scoops on unreleased features.
Wong said she spotted this one by reverse engineering Mediums Android app and monitoring network traffic.The Save to Medium feature appears to scrape web pages, then create a new, unlisted story on Medium.
If deployed, it would mean Medium becomes not just a publishing platform, but also a product like Instapaper, which you could use to read content from around the web.It also involves stripping the content of the publishers ads and moving it out from behind their paywalls.
That doesnt sound too different from existing reader apps in the experience of other TC writers, Instapaper and Pocket can get around paywalls, albeit inconsistently but Wong argued that it could be a more complicated situation for Medium, as its a publisher itself and operates a subscription paywall of its own.
(The company was founded and led by Ev Williams, whos pictured above.)Still, Wong also noted that the feature is likely to evolve before its actually released, and she said, If I may suggest, there are many ways for the media and news publishers to collaborate.
Blocking Mediums Save To Medium scraper from accessing the site should be the last resort.When asked about this, Medium sent the following statement from Vice President of Product Michael Sippey: Nothing to talk about now, but were always experimenting with ways to bring great reading experiences to Medium users.