First, there came an easy, efficient, and sprawling site for uploading, editing, sharing, and watching videos. Now, magazines.
At least, that's the gist we're getting from the new service Zeen, a "coming soon" creation by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen that promises to give users a way to, "discover and create beautiful magazines."
Unfortunately, that's all the details that we — or Fusible, the story's original source — have been able to discern. Interested users can currently sign up to reserve their zeen.com/username address and, in doing so, link their Zeen accounts to either their Facebook or Twitter accounts. But that's it. Even the message that indicates you've successfully signed up for… something… is vague:
"We're really excited to show you what we've been working on, and we'll send you an email when it's ready to go. In the meantime, we sent you an email to verify your email address. Please click on the link in the email so we know you're you! Bye till then!"
Zeen's gone and taken up shop on Twitter (@zeen_com) and Facebook, but the scant updates posted to either site reveal absolutely nothing about what Zeen will ultimately allow users to do.
It's no secret that apps — be they web-based or smartphone-driven — are finding success by allowing users to create and deliver content in a visually pleasing fashion. Especially if users can do so with a management tool that's fairly simple to use. Case in point: The recently released Snapguide, an image-driven Web and iOS app that allows users to quickly create simple how-to guides for any topic they want to talk about.
And the magazine aesthetic is a powerful motivator for app development: Just ask apps like Flipboard or Google Currents, or the full-fledged mobile magazines found in Conde Nast's portfolio of iPad titles. The world might be going digital, but the power of slick, beautiful magazine design is still a heavy influencer.
While we can't quite envision people typing in full magazine pages on their smartphones, a template-driven Web app that gives creative types a means for marrying text with pictures without having to learn (or buy) Adobe InDesign could find success. Especially if self-made editors could easily share that creation across all of their social networks (Instagram-style) — better still if the Web app connects down to a mobile app for easy viewing of magazines on one's tablet or smartphone.
Given Hurley and Chen's track record, it'll be interesting to see whether they can to do text what they previously did to videos. And here's hoping the general Internet population doesn't launch 6,000 different cat magazines once Zeen goes live.
For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).
