Tag Archives: social media curation

Storify gets a new look and promises ‘to revise the entire reader experience’

Storify has a new look, logo and functionality. The tool, which allows you to curate stories using elements from social media like tweets, Flickr photos and YouTube videos, is today rolling out its new features and promising to “revise the entire reader experience” in the coming months.

Building a Storify is smoother and the ability to narrate and explain your curated story is improved. You now view photos as a gallery and drag and drop from right to left. The system also seems more robust. I also tested closing a browser without saving while building this test Storify, which is all about the Guardian’s n0tice platform (the news group’s latest venture into hyperlocal which yesterday invited more users) and found my Storify had auto-saved.

Xavier Damman, Storify’s co-founder, explained the changes:

We’ve taken feedback from users and have rebuilt Storify on a stronger and more reliable foundation, which includes:

  • A new logo and new look. The search and the editor sides of the interface have been switched, and we have made it easier to write your own text into stories, and to add subheds, or headers.
  • An elegant new drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it easier to build stories, and to reorganise them.
  • A collapsed view of your Storify story while it’s being built, so you can see it all easily, and organise it better.
  • A revised Storypad bookmarklet that lets you gather information from all over the web for your Storify stories. You can add the material to a story at any time, and share your Storypad with other users.

The changes are explained in more detail using, of course, Storify itself below:

Breaking News becomes a Storify source

Storify has partnered with Breaking News, the @breakingnews Twitter channel and news site, which is owned by MSNBC.

Storify, which allows users to create a narrative using tweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, Audioboos, Slideshares, Facebook status updates and more as sources, will now include the option of adding Storify as a source.

You can add Breaking News as a source by going to settings within your Storify account. A breakingnews.com logo will appear alongside the images representing the above social networks and allow users to drag and drop content from Breaking News.

Breaking News in the Sources settings

Storify has also added a ‘Storify’ button allowing visitors to its site to take a news story and start to build a timeline.

Storify on BreakingNews.com

There is a Storify on the partnership here.

Storify launched in public beta in April, and was last month named winner of the Knight-Batten award for innovations in Journalism.