But having heard that Storify circumvents that problem and maintains the full graphical embed even if the original Tweet is deleted, I thought it could be a better platform for the project I was working on.
Now that I’ve used and explored Storify, I want to post a frank report on my overall experience. The report breaks down into three sections: Good, Bad, and Ugly…
A Storify Story. The page layout is fixed and there's not even a single alternative theme. Note the unrelated advertising in the right hand 'sidebar'.
THE GOOD
Storify is predominantly an aggregator’s tool, built to facilitate the user’s own narration around content or content snippets from the social and wider Web. The basic idea is that you choose where you want to search for content, be it Twitter, Google, Flickr, Facebook or wherever, then enter your keywords and phrases, browse the results, and drag any result you want to feature straight into your post (subject to copyright – see “The Ugly”!).
Like magic, Storify creates an attributed graphic element in your post for the content you’ve dragged in. The whole thing from search to finished element takes just seconds, but it looks very professional, and it allows the construction of substantially-sized posts in double-quick time.
What’s special about Storify is that the graphical representations of links replace what would be the illustrations in a conventional blog post. There’s no need to upload original photos or screenshots. You just let the graphical links illustrate and punctuate the post. Even text-based additions appear pictorial because of the way the site presents them, and that’s what sets Storify apart from standard blogging platforms. Most bloggers will be endlessly blighted by the feeling of: “Right, that’s the post written – now how the hell am I gonna illustrate it?” With Storify, that situation never arises, because merely adding someone’s quote or even a link to Wikipedia creates the equivalent to a picture. It makes very, very light work of the creative process.
It can be argued that there’s much value in being able to collate important existing matter and references into a digestible summary – especially when it comes to the spam-blasted noise of the Social Web. There’s also, however, an argument that aggregating matter is lazy, is killing the art of writing, and is encouraging more people to contribute less of their own work and personal expression. Equally, there’s a notion that using and linking to the work of others gives THEM greater exposure and recognition. Whether they actually WANT your particular brand of exposure is another matter, but on balance, responsibly exectuted aggregation doesn’t seem to cause too much upset.
Storify does the job it sets out to do, and I can honestly say it provides the easiest method of building modern, impactive looking posts I’ve yet discovered.
The way Storify presents posts as a slideshow within a Tweet is fantastic. It's possible for the viewer to page through all the elements and text in the Story without even leaving Twitter.
THE BAD
Storify isn’t as powerful in SEO terms as some people seem to think. I hoped that because the URLs of published ‘stories’ reside on the site’s root domain (rather than on a subdomain as with Tumblr or WordPress), and because Storify has a good page rank, there’d be a good chance of Google taking a quick interest in posts with substantial original text. But actually, inherently, Google couldn’t care less. In order to get your Storify posts into anything like visible positions on Google you have to backlink to them or at least get some response to them via the social networks.
Given that Storify doesn’t really give you any reward potential when it comes to traffic, there’s no point in backlinking to it, or running around trying to whip up interest. If you’re going to do promotion, you might as well promote a project that’s actually going to gain you something. You can’t put ads on Storify, although they put ads on your pages, so all you’re really doing in running round trying to generate traffic is spending your time putting money into their pocket.
There’s no design flexibility at all on Storify. If you’re used to a standard blogging platform, you’ll probably find the rigid design aspect extremely limiting. You’ll also very likely find the platform overly basic. You can’t, for example, directly upload an avatar. Storify takes your avi from either an existing Gravatar profile, or your Twitter, or your Facebook. Those are the only options. And the system doesn’t work very well. If you change the email address of your Gravatar profile after setting up, Storify ‘loses’ the avatar on your main profile page, and I haven’t yet found a way to restore it. Never could I have imagined that getting the avatar I want onto a Web profile could be so incredibly difficult.
The potential for internal networking isn’t particularly impressive either. Even some of the big TV news organisations only have moderate numbers of followers, and it’s pretty clear there just isn’t the volume there in the userbase at present. In comparison to platforms like Twitter or WordPress, things feel quite dead.
I don’t really understand what Storify’s stats counters are supposed to be doing. Mine appear to register every page view three times, and they count your own, logged-in visits too. Motivational for some perhaps, but for me, completely useless. I want to know how many actual people visit the pages – a wildly inaccurate figure might as well not be there at all. And making all this even worse, your inaccurate stats can’t be removed from public display unless you pay for an upgrade.
Another bad element of Storify is the very skimpy set of user instructions. It feels very much like they're telling you the stuff they want you to know, and ignoring the stuff you need to know. You get the impression that Storify didn't see the point in writing a proper user guide.
I didn't like the way the site assumed I wanted to follow Storify on Storify, and effected the follow for me as part of the account setup process. You can unfollow, but it's not a good sign when you open an account and find you're already following someone you haven't asked to follow. It suggests you're not in control and it just looks bad. If you're not careful to untick a very small tick box during sign-up, the site will also automatically follow Storify for you on Twitter.
Finally, I found Storify’s servers frequently unable to cope with demand, which meant I was regularly delayed by a ‘Try Again’ message.
A Storify Profile Page. If you change the email address on your Gravatar account, this can be left without a profile pic or avatar, and if you don't want to duplicate your Twitter or Facebook profile pic to Storify, there's no obvious solution.
THE UGLY
As you might expect if you’ve read this blog before, the ugly stuff was always going to be privacy- or copyright-orientated. In the case of Storify, it’s both.
You can't make your Stories private or whitelisted-readers-only unless you pay for an upgrade. With a free account, everything you publish is available to the entire Internet.
There's no way I'm aware of to block a follower.
Commenting can’t be disabled unless (yes, you’ve guessed…) you pay for an upgrade. You can delete comments after posting, but there’s a massive negative with commenting in that Storify will post comment links to your social networking account without warning and without permission. The only way to stop Storify from tweeting links to your comments, as far as I can establish, is to actually revoke its access to your Twitter account. Needless to say, based on the fact that I’ve no idea what else it’s going to tweet without telling me, I’ve revoked its access – permanently. That now essentially means I can’t use Storify.
You can’t even use the Twitter search function or embed a Tweet from its URL without granting access to the Storify app. Storify claims this is due to Twitter’s revisions of the API, which have enforced the need for authorisation upon anyone using it.
But I can’t see any need for Storify to use the Twitter API in the first place. Logged out, random people can use Twitter search, and access all public Tweets via their URLs. If I enter a Tweet URL into Storify’s URL finder, it should be able to pull up the data it needs. WordPress.com can, and will display an Embedded Tweet without any authorised Twitter access. But Storify just says: “No results found” if you don’t grant the app access to your Twitter. I’m not convinced by Storify’s line, and I think it’s basically just them trying to force Twitter users to accept an app that doesn’t know how to behave. They just want to promote their site using your Twitter account.
I also don’t like the way Storify’s Publicize feature defaults to auto-tweeting all involved parties when you publish a post. You do have to okay the function with a button click, but the way it’s presented isn’t very clear and new users could easily end up messaging people they don’t want to message. Storify should much more plainly illustrate the full implications of what the Publicize button click is doing.
You’re not just sharing the post on your timeline – you’re personally @messaging everyone whose Tweets you’ve linked to. That’s not just those who posted the Tweets you included either – it’s also everyone THEY’VE mentioned and/or replied to. You could include one person’s Tweet in a story, and end up inadvertently messaging six users you don’t know and in some cases definitely wouldn’t want to get involved with. It seriously needs revision, but Storify won’t care about that. They want you to publicise their site with as much unmitigated spam as possible, and the lack of proper warning prompts is deliberate in my view.
But my biggest concern with Storify is the way it tempts users into breaking copyright law. Storify’s policy is to allow the re-posting of any image matter from Google, Flickr or whatever, and leave the decision on whether it’s actually legal or wise to the user. Storify does attribute any image posted, although if the image found on Google is stolen in the first place, attribution will go to the thief rather than the copyright holder.
But the point is, unless the image was originally posted with a Creative Commons licence (and the overwhelming majority are not), then express permission from the copyright holder is required before anyone is legally allowed to re-post it. I absolutely hate systems that encourage users to take any image that comes up in a search and re-post it, like they’re fully entitled to do it. There’s a warning tucked away in the ToS, but these sites know that virtually no one reads the ToS.
Storify is a kind of user-controlled scraper site, in that the search-drag-drop tools are clearly derived from the kind of principles scraper sites use to translate existing content into attractive-looking, attributed snippets or wholesale lifts. In using Storify, you therefore become a kind of human scraper. You can add value by creating posts around your own original text, but if you’re going to do that, there are far, far better places to do it than Storify.
CONCLUSION
On balance, I wouldn’t recommend Storify because I don’t think the privacy measures are anywhere near good enough, and ultimately the benefits are too heavily stacked in favour of the site owners. It doesn’t really matter what you do with Storify – you end up feeling like you're being used. I know that's all any free website is doing, but with Storify it just seems too obvious.
It’s easy, when something feels like fun and you get a lot published quickly, to persuade yourself that you’re doing a good thing. But eventually you have to face the fact that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you’re not having to work hard on your content, it isn’t going to have much value, and you’re certainly never going to come up with a defining, game-changing piece of work. You can repackage other people’s thoughts until you’re blue in the face, but they’ll always be other people’s thoughts. Storify posts have little serious value, and that’s reflected in the fact that you very rarely come across them when searching for stuff on Google.
If you’re comfortable with that, you think basic is beautiful, and you don’t object to a Web service that posts messages in your name without telling you, go ahead and try Storify. But if you care about privacy, want to build something a bit more personalised, and want to get away from the Internet’s grand scourge of perpetual regurgitation, make the effort, think harder, say it in your own words and pictures.
