Storify: Create Stories Using Social Media

Social media is turning out to be an awesome resource for finding news and information. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of professional and amateur sources, there is no dearth of content on any given topic. But the volume of information passing through the social streams is quiet heavy and is becoming increasingly tedious for consuming them straight up.

Some sort of curation and an edible wrapper would help a lot of folks. Storify lets you consume social media in a brand new way – by creating stories using social media. Interested in knowing how its done? Read on.

Overview

Storify turns what people post on social media into compelling stories. With this web app you can now collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

Storify is in private beta. You will have to submit your email address and wait for an invite to arrive. My first invite came within a few days and it expired almost immediately. They sent me a new invite (and to all others in that batch) and that too expired within a few days. So, if you come across an invite, use it ASAP. The app is free as of now.

Getting Started

As with all modern web apps involving social media, Storify allows you to sign in using your existing Twitter account. Sign in happens via OAuth and hence no need to submit login credentials to Storify. Immediately after the authorization, Storify requires you to submit your email address.

As soon as you are done submitting an email id, the Story Creation page shows up. Hitting Create Your First Story Now will take you to the dashboard.

The Dashboard looks great with modern design elements and a near zero clutter. You have the social stream on the left and a compose window to the right. The compose window to the right is where you give a title and few words of description about the story. So how do you get to tell a story using the words & voices of others? By dragging and dropping tweets and updates from the stream.

Creating a Story

Since we have started by adding the Twitter account, the tweet stream is the default source of information to start with. Storify brings the entire Twitter environment to you complete with a timeline, favorite tweets, a search box and the list of users you subscribe to. Its pretty cool that the app acts as a third party Twitter app for the most part (except that you can send Tweets or retweet from here).

Give the story a title and explain what it is about to your readers. Use the arrow keys to navigate through the images available. Now comes the art of adding content. Find the tweets that you want to be in your story. Then just drag and drop to the right side column. It’s as simple as that.

Just drag and drop content one after another in the rightful order you want them to be. Think you need some commentary in between what others have said about the subject? You can do that too! Hit the T icon immediately below or above the Tweets you have just added to bring up the new compose window.

You can continue to do the same as and when required and I have to admit that this works pretty seamlessly.

Discovering Social Media

The beauty of Storify is that it does not stop with Tweets. You can add Facebook updates, YouTube videos, Flickr images, RSS feeds, Google Search results and links to websites to your story. Navigate to the appropriate icon to access the respective service and make use of the search box to find the relevant content. As you soon as you find them, drag and drop them as before and your will story will now be more interesting with data from multiple sources and outlets.

I tried a Flickr search for images of a Peacock. The results were very accurate and to my surprise, the image I dragged and dropped wasn’t a tiny thumbnail as displayed in the search results section. A neatly resized image of the original Flicr post that fits in nicely with the original layout of the story was the end result. Great job Storify!

It doesn’t stop with just images. Videos get the same embeddable treatment too. Once you are satisfied with the way the story has shaped up, hit Publish and the story will go live.

All stories get published in Storify and you have embed codes to post them at your own website too. Alternatively, you can save the stories as Drafts for editing and updating them at a later time.

Public Story Page

All publishes stories are available for anyone to see. If you want to take a look at the stories created by others, check out the featured and new stories sections in the Storify homepage. Interesting traffic analysis of each story is available for everyone to see how popular the story is.

Auto Publishing

If you don’t want to copy and paste the embed code everytime you create story, try the Auto Publish options in the Settings page. Storify supports five major platforms – WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter and MailChimp – and once you submit the URL of the website and the login information, your stories will be cross posted automatically.

Final Thoughts

Storify is an impressive new way to consume social media in a sane way. However, I would really love to see a WYSIWYG editor for the compose window in a future update. A way to upload images directly from the desktop wouldn’t hurt either. Even in the beta stage, the web app looks promising and am very much looking forward to newer additions.

Share Your Thoughts!

Like what Storify offers? Is this how we will consume news and information in the future ?