There is a lot of information that can be gathered through social media. Posts are being made by people around the world, much can be opinions, other posts are from people right where something is happening. While an individual can sift through the many social systems they belong to, it isn’t easy to put all that information together to share. When in Twitter, there is the option to re-twit. Facebook, you can share, and YouTube lets you put the video on a site or share a link.
For a while, a Web page service to help pull the data together has been on our radar. The service has now come to our iPads as a Free app. Storify is an app that lets you create a ‘Story’. Title it, add a description, then start using the quick access buttons to pull up multiple social services to find more information. When you have a story built, share it with others via the Storify site or through
A story can be on an event you went to, a top new news item, a subject you feel others should know about… the only limitation is what is posted on social services.
The tool bar on the right starts off with a few of the top social services that might have news/posts you want to use for your Story document. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, all with quick search to find people or subjects in posts. They do require you give Storify access the first time you use them. Note that the Twitter option opens to a ‘people’ search, if looking for a subject for your story, choose the magnify glass.
Including videos in your Storify document gives more impact to the Story. Many people will copy/paste posts from social sites into a text document, but that isn’t very visual. Searching through YouTube videos is easy, then just drag/drop to the Story document.
Flickr is always a great source of images on a subject. Images can be added by just dragging them from the Storify Flickr search. Particularly handy for hot topics and events.
The last option on the Storify toolbar is a Internet Web search via Google. The browser page opens in the app to find related content.
When a site is found on the subject matter, use the ‘Add to story’ button to move a snapshot/shortcut of the site to your Storify Story.
As you pull your information together, items can be re-ordered with drag/drop bars. While fun for getting late breaking news together to share with co-workers, Storify also provides a nice way to train people through a single document with multiple information sources in one.
