Storify, the beloved digital publishing tool that allowed writers to chronologically arrange social media posts, will soon be no more. The curation service will go offline May 16, 2018, the company announced today. For those who have used the service and want to preserve that content, they’ll have to take steps over the next few months to archive it elsewhere. (See instructions here.) Otherwise, they will have to purchase a Livefyre license in order to use its newest product, Storify 2.
Storify’s tool was once a must-have for journalists who wished to participate in “the social web” and include social media (!) in their online stories. (I even used it only a few months back for a this story, tracking the various changes Facebook made to its news feed.) But as other social networks launched new chronology and curation tools–such as Facebook’s moments and Twitter’s threading–which allowed users to embed those threads elsewhere, Storify became less useful.
A sequence of acquisitions–the digestive process of the startup lifecycle–didn’t make things any easier. In 2013, the company was purchased by the digital marketing company Livefyre. Three years later, Adobe bought Livefyre, which likely sealed Storify’s fate as a free service.
“Since Livefyre was acquired by Adobe in March 2016, we’ve been fully integrating and aligning the product with Adobe Experience Cloud and its enterprise solutions,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. Storify, they said, was “an offering that doesn’t fit in this strategy.”
The news of Storify’s departure coincides with another telling development: Today, Twitter began rolling out an update designed to make it even easier, for better or worse, to create and read tweetstorms, or, as the company calls them, “threads.” Or, as Storify once called them, “stories.”
https://twitter.com/Anthony/status/940697882147086336
For almost two years I tracked more than 90 arrests of journalists around the United States using Storify. Today I learned Storify is shutting down and deleting all content in a few months. https://t.co/Dej8YeyeVj
— Josh Stearns (@jcstearns) December 12, 2017
Storify shutting down = another reminder that all digital archiving should happen on non-commercial platforms that have long-term archival strategies.
— mesk (@_mesk) December 12, 2017
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