As our content is scattered across sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the idea of a single, standalone website is starting to feel a bit quaint. On the consumer side, we’re seeing that with products like About.me and Flavors.me, which try to unify your various social identities in one place. Now a digital agency called Sparkart is tackling the problem from the brand and business side, with a product called Storyteller.
Sparkart founder and CEO Naveen Jain says that Storyteller “is not a toy” — you need basic development skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to use it, because you’re building sites that have the branding and functionality that you want. Right now, he says if website developers want to integrate content from other sites, they have to either manually integrate with the API of each and every site, or wait for their content management system to add the relevant upgrade or plug-in. Then, once they’re integrated, they’d have to keep track of any changes to the API and its policies. With Storyteller, on the other hand, they can access data from other sites while the platform does all the “heavy lifting.”
This was, apparently, something that Sparkart created for itself, having built websites for 300 customers including Bon Jovi, The Killers, Slipknot, Keith Urban, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and America’s Cup. Jain says the agency will be using Storyteller for every website it creates going forward. The team gave me a quick demo of the product by building a Bon Jovi site — since I’m not a developer, the product is a bit hard to judge, but they did get a nice-looking website up with YouTube videos, Tumblr posts, and more, in just a few minutes.
Storyteller is launching today in an invite-only beta. Jain says that he eventually plans to spin the product out into a separate business, so that he can avoid the problems (as he calls it, “a Jekyll-and-Hyde effect”) that agencies face when they get into the product business.