Now more than ever, social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are a integral part of real-time storytelling and journalism. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last fall, Storify debuted its content curation platform that brought together Tweets, Facebook Status Updates, videos and more from social networking sites to create a realtime view into a story or issue. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised $2 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures.
Storify, which is still in private beta, allows you to build and embed a story around a gathering of Tweets, Flickr photos, Facebook status updates, YouTube videos and more (We should note that Twitter offers its own technology to embed Tweets). Within Storify’s platform, you can simple search and drag content into your Storify story. Once you create a story with all of this curated content, you can then embed the actual story in your blog or content management system via single like of Javascript.
It’s fairly simple and easy to read, as you can see from the sample embedded story we’ve placed in this post about Storify’s funding (here’s a Storify post about the recent protests in Egypt) Readers can also Tweet and share from Storify posts. And although in private beta, Storify has signed a number of high-profile partnerships with media organizations, including the Washington Post, Seattle Times, NPR, and Al Jazeera. Since last fall, 10,000 Storify stories have been created by partners, with the stories attracting 4.5 million views.
The new funding will be used to build out new capabilities and publishing options, says the company’s co-founder Burt Herman (who is actually a former journalist). Already, Storify is connected to blogging platforms Posterous and Tumblr, so users can publish stories directly in Storify to Posterous and Tumblr.
And for any journalists or media organizations who are interested in using Storify, the startup’s platform should be opened to the public in the next few months, says Herman.
Storify demo from Burt Herman on Vimeo.
Turn what people post on social media into compelling stories. With Storify, you collect the best photos, video, quotes from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere. It’s the best way to capture an event whether it’s a news event, a conference, a product launch, a wedding, … Social media streams flow, but stories last.
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