YouTube Founders Building Mysterious Magazine Publishing App
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.