What’s happening? This is what Twitter asks you every time you go to post a new update. Often what’s happening is that I’ve found an awesome picture on the internet or I need to inform the world that I just ate a delicious Five Guys cheeseburger. Sometimes though, what is happening is also happening to a number of other people around you. You’re at the Woman’s World Cup championship, or in the middle of a nationwide protest, or just watched the final space shuttle launch. It’s becoming more and more obvious as Twitter’s ubiquity grows that there is content being created that is worth finding, archiving and organizing in to stories. Enter: Storify.
Storify is, according to their blog, “a company building tools to help journalists, bloggers and experts curate the real-time Web.” You log in a click “Create Story.” You’re presented with a two column web app that lets you search Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google and other places for content. The content that comes up can be dragged into the second column and ordered into a flowing story of tweets, updates and pictures. It’s awesome. It’s been used to track the protests in Egypt, showing updates from real people, reporters and commentators as things progressed. Here is one of the Joplin tornado, following updates as they tornatdo touched down, as it was going through the city and finally as people started reacting.
Storify has personal uses as well. Last weekend was my friends’ wedding and I used Storify to collect tweets and pictures from the days leading up to the wedding and then the wedding itself. It’s a fun archive for the bride and groom of what friends were saying that day. You could even having a running Storify of your favorite tweets about a particular subject or that you think are funny. The possibilities are almost endless. Storify is the perfect example of how big an impact social media is having on how we communicate, both about our lives and about what’s happening in the world around us. Are the two even that different anymore? Or is it all one flow of news, data and vicarious experiences that are forming our global culture? #deepthoughts
