If you have not discovered the benefit of curating links online for personal reference, sharing with team members or colleagues and for research, you are certainly impacting your productivity.
Over the years I have used and recommend many tools in my digital marketing workshops and in my social media marketing programmes for PR and communications professionals. One of my favourite tools has been Sotrify which I have used for more than 7 years. Over that time I have created around 400 stories – some are private in draft as I was using the free plan and these were for my personal research. Others were public and included resources I share in my workshops.
So it was somewhat disturbing to learn that the service would cease to exist as at 16 May 2018.
While the product was far from perfect – for example I could not publish private stories, nor could I share stories with select people as I can with a curated board on Pinterest – it was a tool I used every single week to curate the resources I refer to in my weekly live stream show.
Many publishers use Storify to curate Tweets and embed them in their articles and news stories. People who host Twitter chats use Storify to curate key Tweets from their online events. It is important to know that any currently embedded stories will no longer render as of 17 May 2018 so visitors will not be able to view your curated content on your site.
I have to admit I did not use Storify as much in the last year however due to a platform I came across accidentally – Wakelet.
Over the last year I have had numerous conversations with members of the Wakelet team and have seen them continuously enhance the platform. They have many features that made it more effective for my needs than Storify and therefore when I heard of the news about Storify closing I immediately contacted the team at Wakelet to see if they could come up with a solution to import our stories from Storify.
And the team rose to the challenge – I provided them some public stories to test their implementation and then they announced a few months ago that the tool was now available.
If you have procrastinated in relation to exporting your Storify content to HTML or PDF versions, you still have time, but my recommendation is to import your stories into Wakelet. In the screen shots below I share with you how to do this and also what I did to overcome an issue I found with the export.
How to import Your Storify Content into Wakelet
You can find the details of the end of life announcement for Storify at the top of their platform with the reminder of the closure date being the 16 May 2018.
When you visit your Storify account you will see all your public stories – you then need to log in.
Once you have logged into your account you will also see all your draft stories. You will need to publish the content as the Wakelet import will not be able to import stories that are in draft.
I recommend taking the time to review and delete stories from your Storify account that are no longer relevant before you import content into Wakelet if you have the time to do so. You should be able to easily delete the content – if, as I did, run into an issue and it will not let you delete content, you can reach out to the support team at Storify who can adjust settings on your account to make this possible.
When you hover over your curations on Storify, you will be able to see the options to edit, view or delete your content.
Having tidied up your Storify account, publishing draft content and deleting content you no longer want an archive of, now it is time to import your content into Wakelet.
If you are already an avid user of Wakelet you might want to create a new account (that is what I did) to keep all your Storify content together so that you can then review it over time. One benefit of Wakelet is the fact that you can have a link that is private, unlisted which means you can share with people or public. All imported content from Storify, however, is public which is another reason you might want to import content to a secondary Wakelet account, especially if you think it will take time to review all your curations.
Wakelet at this time is free to use. Once you are logged into your account on Wakelet, you will see on the left hand side the option to import content from Storify.
You will be invited to add the account name for your Storify content and then you can request the import of all your content into Wakelet.
You will then see a notification to say the import is being processed – then as if by magic all your stories will be pulled into Wakelet!
If you prefer you can select specific stories to import into Wakelet:
1 – Select the board that you want to import from Storify
2 – You will then see the number of stories selected and can start the import.
In total I imported into my new Wakelet account, 316 stories which had 5320 individual URL’s, once I deleted some of my content, and that took about 30 minutes for the process to be completed.
I have to say I am really thankful for Storify and the fact that they provided a good notice period for people to manage the transition for their curations and the fact they have had someone managing help requests where people have run into issues with exporting content, such as I did.
And I am delighted that I discovered Wakelet a year ago and that their development team could see that they could help Storify users and at the same time build their user base for their startup.
While you will need the desktop version of Wakelet to manage the import of your content, you can curate and view your content using their Android and iOS apps – that is a feature that Storify did not offer, and it is why I am able to easily curate content to Wakelet on a daily basis from wherever I am.
On Wakelet, you can also add collaborators to your curations, switch between multiple accounts and also share Twitter notifications if you curate content from Twitter (this last feature is one that Storify also offered).
If you have been procrastinating with a decision on what you need to make with regard to your Storify content, I strongly recommend you take the time to import it into Wakelet.
My next job is now to go through my curated stories and decide which I want to make private and also I can re-order the content on my account on my new Wakelet account.
There are lots of features I would like to see Wakelet deliver on in the year ahead, especially the ability to search from curations espeically if like me you have hundreds on your accounts, and I would love them to bring back a feature they recently changed which was made it possible to see details of content you have curated from private posts on Facebook – but despite that, you won’t find a better free curation platform that works on desktop, mobile and provides for private and pubic sharing.
Let me know what you plan to do with your Storify archives before they close the door for good!
