Social Networking Storytelling
Not sure whether this will take off or not, but Storify is now in public beta since last month. Storify allows you to pull together a ‘story’ by consolidating related content (tweets, Youtube vids, links, RSS etc) onto one webpage, interspersing you own commentary if you wish. I can see that this will have a very useful application for creating a permanent record of instantaneous reactions on Twitter to breaking news or during events. The facility to pull out the tweets that you consider most relevant, and support those with other content and your own comments, creates a richer, more focused and personal narrative than just looking back at the hit and miss tweets on a particular hashtag or search.
I have not had a go at creating my own yet, but perhaps tomorrow’s trip to the OpenTech conference will provide such an opportunity. The interface for creating your ‘stories’ looks intuitive, allowing you with Twitter to select the tweets you want from your own timeline, your own tweets, your favorites, a search term or from a particular user or list. This gives a good deal of flexibility; you could for example, if you are at a conference, favorite all the best tweets of the day and come back to those at the end of the day to order them and put them into a coherent story.
Here is an example of a good use of Storify that is featured on their homepage. It details how a man tracked a laptop he believed had been stolen and eventually got it returned thanks (in part) to the interventions of those helping him on Twitter.
UPDATE: I should note that one thing that appears to be missing from Storify is the facility for collaborative story-building. Not sure if I have missed something in the settings or if it is to be developed for a later release, but this would seem to be a glaring omission considering it is designed to create stories from social media.