Storify is an online platform owned by Livefyre that allows users to create stories using elements curated from the social web.
Storify allows users to include information from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other publicly available sites to create embeddable narratives through a process of search, drag, and drop. The platform imports elements’ metadata into stories so that, for example, tweets’ authors, timestamps, and URLs become part of the stories that include them. Storify also allows for the post-publishing editing of stories.
Storify was founded by Burt Herman, a former AP journalist and the founder of the meetup group Hacks/Hackers, and the developer and entrepreneur Xavier Damman. It originated as part of Herman’s Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, where he spent much of his year thinking about the real-time web and the increasing necessity of filtering it through narrative. (The project’s name comes from a common internal request from AP editors to their reporters: “Can u pls storify?”) The platform was launched in private beta at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2010, as a contestant in the conference’s “Startup Battlefield” competition.