Storify is fittingly acquired by Livefyre social curation platform
Both companies help direct social media for high-profile customers like The New York Times, The White House, HBO, and Microsoft, so, it only makes sense they would come together.
Livefyre's acquisition of Storify seems to make sense -- it's the marriage of a social storytelling tool to a social curation platform. The two companies announced their union on Monday.
Although not a household name, Livefyre lets millions of users share, tweet, and post news stories they see on the Web. The company's more than 400 customers include CNET's parent company, CBS, and dozens of other news sites such as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fox News. Brands including American Idol, Sony PlayStation, and Nascar use the service.
Storify is a tool that lets news sites and brand-name companies tell stories on the Web using social media. Its customers can collect tweets, photos, videos, and multimedia from across the Web to create embeddable stories. Nearly one million publishers, government agencies, and brands use the service, including CNN, The New York Times, The White House, the United Nations, HBO, and Microsoft.
"Acquiring Storify made perfect sense," Livefyre founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer said in a statement. "Livefyre powers social media and user engagement on the largest media properties and brands on the web. Storify also delivers a unique and vital curation tool for journalists and editors at many of those same companies."
What does this mean for users? For one thing, they'll most likely see more social enterprise features on news sites and at brands' Web sites. For another, Storify and Livefyre customers will be able to easily manage their social media content and engagement from one central location.
"Livefyre customers will be able to centrally manage both automated and editorial curation from the same moderation user interface and in the future, be able to drag-and-drop specific tweets and posts into any Livefyre application, including real-time comments, live blogs, live chats, media walls, and native ads," Kretchmer told CNET. "This opens up completely new possibilities for how social content can be integrated into Web sites, mobile apps, advertisements, and TV broadcasts."
For its part, Storify aims to get its embeddable stories to be even more widespread, along with adding new features, such as single sign-on to create stories, user participation tools, Storify galleries, and more.
"We created Storify to unite journalism and social media, helping to tell stories that come alive with eyewitness reports from where news is happening," Storify co-founder Burt Herman said. "Joining Livefyre means our users, including journalists and now brands and agencies, will be able to integrate social media easily across their Web sites, and also into mobile apps, ads and TV broadcasts."
With the acquisition, Storify will continue as a standalone product. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.