Storify

The 2011-2012 Egyptian revolution unfolded on Twitter. Thousands of people joined the "Occupy" movement after learning about it through Facebook and Instagram. Social websites and services have changed the way we consume news stories, but also how the stories themselves come to be. Storify (free) seeks to build on this new way of constructing and telling stories and does so fairly well, though its full potential seems yet unrealized, due to the site being somewhat nascent (it is technically a beta, though it's been around for nearly a year). Storify could easily become hugely influential in shaping how we use the Internet. It needs a little fine-tuning, but is an exciting service in an equally exciting field.

How Storify Works
Storify is similar to a blogging platform, like Blogger or WordPress.com, in that it lets anyone write or upload images of original content, and publish them as stories or posts through simple editing tools. What Storify does differently is give you tools to integrate other people's voices into your own posts. With a few clicks, you can find tweets from Twitter, images from Instagram and Flickr, and videos from YouTube and thread them into your post. Or, you can skip original words and images altogether and cultivate a story told entirely by others?a powerful way to selectively illustrate an idea, concept, or story if done skillfully. ??

Each story that you create, like a blog post, needs a title. You can optionally add a subtitle below it. In the body of the article, you can write your own content (with a few formatting tools like bold, italic, and hyperlink at the top to help you), or use additional tools in the area called "media" on the right to search for socially shared content to fold in to your story.

Features
The media section comes with a few preselected sources, but you can customize what shows up there in the settings. The sources include: Storify (to add from other Storify users), Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Google, Tumblr, Breaking News, Chute, SoundCloud, Disqus, GetGlue, StockTwits, RSS, and "Embed URL" (meaning add a link to any site with a snippet of information provided by the site).

Additionally, Storify provides a browser button that you can add to Chrome, Firefox, and Safari so that when you land on a Web page that has interesting content that you want to add to your Storify page, you can click the button and have new content added to your story quickly and easily.

The site could raise a lot of questions about authorship and rights, but it actually handles most IP concerns rather well. The site always preserves the attribution and metadata for everything you "borrow" and quote. It also has a built-in tool that lets you notify the original sources of the work that you're citing them.

I couldn't find an image-upload button to add original pictures to my stories; I had to rely on the links to Flickr, Instagram, and other places where I host images. The lack of an image-uploading tool seems like a glaring omission. Apparently, there is a way to use ifttt to automatically have photos you put into Dropbox appear in Storify, but I did not try that hacked solution.

Although I had some trouble with photos, another neat feature that I do like in Storify is the ability to embed anywhere on the Web your Storify creation. It's as simple as copying and pasting an embed code (similar to embedding a video). Avid bloggers and website writers should appreciate this ability, particularly those using Wordpress or Drupal, as Storify integrates with those platforms. Storify also offers the ability to publish your pieces to Tumblr and Posterous .

Exploring New Storify Users
As with most socially aware sites, Storify lets you follow other users, and they you, to explore new storyboards being created. I found people from my Twitter stream making stories, as well as several well known newspapers and websites. Unfortunately, there's no centralized or formatted way to find new people. The best I could was start on the Storify homepage, where there are featured stories every day, and click on the author. From there, you can choose to follow the person. That all works fine, but it's unclear how you would find more people.

What you can do is see whom that person follows or who is following him, but it's easy to get lost and wind up on a dead-end. ?I would follow many more people if there were a way to browse for them by interest.

Storify for Change
Growing quickly and attracting interesting new users every day, Storify fits keenly in with other still experimental platforms that are changing the way we construct and consume ideas and information online. Storify, which has been in public beta since April 2011, shows plenty of potential, even though it could use a little more fine tuning.

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