Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
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Medium
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Medium is a blogging and web publishing platform from the company of the same name in San Francisco, California.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
If you are vanity publishing and just want to see your stuff on the web, it is very, VERY easy to get involved with. Of course, your writing is not likely to stand out if you don't have a clear plan. The more I use it, the more I like it. The user interface is extremely well-done. I kinda wish my WordPress-based blogs had editors that were that easy to use.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
Medium is supported across android, iOS and the web. While it may not have all the languages supported, English is certainly an option and with a pricing model that ranges from free to $5 for a subscription, you can't go wrong whether you're a small or large business. Everything is hosted in the cloud so it is very accessible
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
There are a handful of other blogging platforms available. The biggest difference between Medium and others is how streamlined it is. It's straight to the point and is excellent at showing related content, be it your own or another users. There's no new design to navigate between posts, everything is where you expect it to be letting you focus on the post.
Good way to raise awareness of our content with @mentioned influencers
Good way to link back to your original content
Aside from publishing your own content Medium is a great news site in its own right. If you're looking for relevant industry news or other content, check in daily to see what's going on with others in your industry.
