I love blogging and sharing information that I find across the web on any given subject as soon as I see it. I came across this great tool called Storify which lets you do just that in a nice visual format.
The way it works is that you pull information from Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud, YouTube and many others into one big story that you can then share with your friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook. Now the idea of this is really simple and you would think that this would be really easy to use. Unfortunately, I found a few stumbling blocks when I tried it out. Once I developed my story, I couldn’t export it to other programs such as WordPress or Tumblr even though it says that you can do so. Upon further investigation, I found out that you can only do this on WordPress if you have a self hosted account and the plug-in (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/storify/?utm_source=Users). I also couldn’t find any way to delete the snippets that I had to create once I was finished using them in my story. Do they just sit there forever? That would seem to get confusing and cluttered after a while. There also doesn’t seem to be a standard help section or forum to answer questions.
Overall I like the concept of the platform because you can gather a lot of information very quickly and share it immediately. I also liked that when you publish your story to your twitter account, it also notifies the author or tweeter to let them know that their content was used in your story. This is a great way of course to generate goodwill with other writers and bloggers. I really hope they get past these small quirks because as it stands now this platform is a little limited. If you use this program with WordPress or Tumblr I would love to know how it works for you.
Here is an overview of Storify:
