Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash
Like many other this week I got an email informing me that “unfortunately Storify.com will no longer be available after May 16, 2018“. This came as a bit of a blow to me. I really like Storify as a way to collate tweets. I know that it is easier to embed tweets now then when Storify started. I did play around with the twitter stories feature for a bit but went back to storify. I just preferred the storify UI and end presentation.
I created my first storify back back in February 2011. At that time I was working for CETIS and it was a great tool to use to summarize meetings/conferences/events I was attending organising. I really liked it as an alternative/addition to me writing a blog post about, particularly a community driven, events as it allowed me to pull in some of the insightful commentary that people at the event were contributing and, well you know, create a story that was based on what people actually said, and not just my interpretation of the day.
Like most tools/services, my use of it has changed over the years. I’ve used for collating tweets more as personal notes that I haven’t shared, and also to catch some random but useful twitter conversations. This is still the best explanation of betweenness centrality ever! Storify also came into its own for saving tweet chats, e.g BYOD4L. What a huge amount of community sharing and expertise lies within all those stories.
Looking back now, I have 50 stories in my personal account, which in total have had over 19,500 views. But what should I do now? Do I archive them – and if I do where should I save/share them? Should I just save the ones with the most views? Does it really matter? Should I just consign this another digital ephemeral experience? Should I buy a livefyre licence to access Storify 2? Guess the answer to that will depend on how much it costs.
I’m sure I will get over the loss of Storify, and of course there are other archiving tools I can, and do use – not least the amazing Tags. But there was just something nice, simple and good about it.