As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of Storify as an excellent tool to curate and tweets around a particular topic (you can see all my Storify stories here).
Twitter announced that its TweetDeck tool added “Custom Timelines” as a new feature. You can read all about it at that link, but, basically, you can drag-and-drop any tweets you want into a timeline that you can then embed.
In other words, it sounds like it can do the primary task that Storify does. Of course, Storify also lets you drag-and-drop images, websites, videos, and other resources off the web into your collection, which Custom Timelines don’t allow you to do — at least not yet.
And I haven’t actually tried Custom Timelines yet, so perhaps it isn’t as easy as TweetDeck’s screenshots show it to be.
I’ll play around with it later this week. This just points out the fragility — again — of all these Web 2.0 tools, and of the content we we create using them. Perhaps I’m missing it, but there doesn’t appear to be any way to back-up Storifies that are created now. I’m going to contact them to see if that’s possible….
I’m adding this info to The Best Resources For Beginning To Learn What Twitter Is All About.
Hi Larry
I’ve had a really quick play and for the way I like to use Storify for planning posts — Storify is the better option. It will be interesting to see as they develop extra features if this becomes a bigger issue for Storfiy.
From what I can see you can’t change the order of tweets once you’ve added them into the timeline and the next tweet is always added to the top of the timeline. But maybe I am wrong. I like to move the tweets around in Storify as I build my ideas.
It also embeds into blogs using the Timeline widget which is similar looking to the Twitter widget. I like the fact that Storify provides two options for embedding.
It might be handy for Twitter chat archives when you are wanting fast and aren’t as worried about order?
Sue
Sue,
You may very well be right. I like Storify, will continue to use it, and hope they are able to survive.
Larry
Hi Larry,
I have discovered Storify a bit lately but it is better to be late than never. I agree with you about the fragility of all those web 2.0 tools out there. There are so many of them that this variety can be scary for teachers who do not make the most of the technology at present. I like the idea of contacting the creators of those tools as in this case and see how our way of usages improve them. At this point, I must note that Storify is very open to suggestions and they are constantly working to make the site more functional based on requests of the users on their website.
By the way, I recently reviewed Storify for language learning and teaching at my blog (idiolectica.wordpress.com) and wonder what you think about it as an experienced Storify user. 🙂
Osman
As I mentioned, I’ve been a big fan of Storify, and plan to continue to use it. But I will still be trying out the new TweetDeck feature.
Hi Larry and Sue , got a message from Hootesuite today that you can now create a custom timeline and embed it by dragging tweets into it. Looks like they are all getting onto the bandwagon 🙂