A reader will always follow a path and every path is a single story. Like how you are not aware of other parallel universes. So I still think it's more of the hardware that's being reimagined. You just flip the book differently.
About your two friends, it sounds like intuition. How do you think it relates?
Svbtle's great for some people and Medium's better in some ways. It's like comparing Blogger with WordPress. The future is in content-centricity and interface-simplicity. Let's appreciate these guys for leading the frontier.
PS: This one is more in tune with how the brain works. Pretty radical idea for a writing interface. https://vimeo.com/66995098
We're extremely good at some things but at the expense of everything else. Thus our lives generally aren't very interesting. I'm a pretty smart guy (140± IQ) who dropped out of the system when I was 15 and went through non-systematic but relentless self-education. The learning habits formed in school helped. But I was 'free'. My point is whatever the status quo, there will be a minority that will abandon the system taking along with them only the good parts and then become interesting. So with a bigger population, you get more of such minority which causes Microsofts, Googles and Apples to happen.
Looks like http://www.likabl.es and http://dropula.com. I still prefer the Reddit/HN style layout. Feels like reading a magazine (no sense of rank) now rather than a list of ranked articles.
I've been a designer all my professional life and belonged to the find-a-developer-for-idea-X category. I've been lucky to have had the help of really good tech friends but it never felt right. It's like sculpting with a proxy. A part of me yearns to feel the plaster and chisels with my own hands. So like you I just did it.
I launched http://mocku.ps/ a few months ago, by putting together everything I learned from books and tutorials, asking on Stack Overflow, trial and error and sleepless nights hunched over my code editor. I almost permanently pissed off my wife.
Craving more now I'm on to my next project http://paperi.st/. It feels great to be able to produce what's in your mind by yourself.
I wanted to suggest something in an interesting way. In the context of the product which I should not reveal yet, the interaction would make a lot of sense. I don't expect people to think this is the best email sign up mechanism. As long as it tickles the landing page has fulfilled it's purpose.