The Straight TK on MediumTK.
To disambiguate it, the right tag is probably #MediumTK.
We teased that we’ve broken ground on a new writing app and by teased, I mean we really went all in on dropping hints. Waiting list here: medium.com/tk
It started with a Threads post where I said we were thinking about working on a writing app but didn’t know what to name it and so were just using TK as a placeholder. That was five weeks ago.
Then I got cornered in an interview by at Semafor about whether we were working new AI-enabled tools. My answer was, “Short answer, yes. The longer answer, is as the editorial term for a placeholder to fill in later, TK.”
Two hours after he posted the interview, we were announcing at Medium Day that that work is literally called TK.
Then the Medium Day keynote was filled with TK references, including an aside where explained that TK is the editorial term for putting a placeholder in your writing.
That led to a long discussion from the attendees in the chat about this feature and how they already use the built-in version in Medium’s existing editor.
Then, we closed out the keynote with this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPnceTipKf0
Here’s the transcript of what I said after the video (as taken from the script I wrote in TK).
We’ve broken ground on a new writing app. That TK feature is one of four innovations that we are designing the app around. But it’s the one that most shows that Medium is for humans and that the role of technology is to be your assistant not your replacement. I’ll leave the other three innovations as a mystery for now. They are TK as they say.
TK is wait list only. I can share where we are in the development of it. It’s far enough along that I use it every day for all of my writing. It’s got my notes, my drafts, and basically of all my writing history. That prior history fuels my future writing. For me, that history has 3000 posts, drafts, and responses that I’ve written on Medium and another 3000 notes that imported from my old note taking tools. And yet, we’re still a ways off from opening it up to beta users.
TK will be for our Friends of Medium tier only. That should tell you a lot about what we intend — it’s to make a writing tool that is powerful enough to pay for.
The invites will be going out gradually and on a first come first serve basis.
For me, TK has been capturing my writing at an earlier and more nascent stage. But getting me to do more notes and drafts ends up being the precursor to publishing more as well. And, yes, I do hope to sneak some features in to make Interstitial Journaling work.
