Content and content
The challenge between contemporary social media is on the edge of the timeline. Each of the major networks is increasingly focusing on the timeline as the ordering principle of the chaotic and continuous flow of news, photos and videos. The reason is that within this narrow and long field live two phenomena that count like few others in the definition of the contemporary world: the Event and the Narration.
In fact, we know that any operation, cultural or otherwise, now revolves around the event, so much so that books, films and music are consumed only in relation to the highly appealing initiative that accompanies them. Books are mainly sold during presentations, the music industry exists thanks to concerts and films are increasingly focusing on short and massive releases or, in the case of auteur cinema, on international festivals and reviews. But, in parallel, in addition to the salient moment capable of making all the feverish expectation and the eyes of a small or large community converge towards itself, the great stories, those capable of giving an order to actions and situations and duly delving into details and background, are finding renewed interest, also in response to general bewilderment. These two poles together constitute exactly the heart of today's cultural industry, being what dictates the pace and results of the entire supply chain.
They are two time systems which, from television series to literary sagas, from information to advertising, continually find new outlets and domains of interest. Returning to social media, Event and Narration can in a certain sense be embodied by Twitter and Storify respectively. The first, a giant of today's social media together with Facebook, is linked to the idea of an event: short, concentrated, sententious and, theoretically, disruptive sentences. Storify, on the contrary, is based on the importance of narration, as a network based on the possibility of putting together salient texts, photos, videos and comments that effectively and exhaustively tell a given moment. Therefore, if Storify and Twitter are born under the same star of expression and sharing as the other social networks, however, the paths with which they are built are opposite: micro-blogging specifically set on variety and on real time that of Twitter; a flow with an exhaustive, complex and monothematic vocation for Storify.
The importance of taking care of your timeline
However, just as event and narration cannot live on opposite sides of the notion of time, but tend to overlap and live more and more as a function of each other, so it also happens to Storify and Twitter. Twitter has so far been the main source of content for Storify, which sees its historical reconstructions abound in official and essential tweets. Storify, on the other hand, has recently been challenged on the ground of completeness by the announcement by the blue bird company that it wants to create a new customizable flow related to a given event.
This stream, dubbed Custom Timeline, is a new type of tweet storage that takes advantage of the TweetDeck platform to select and share just a few tweets from your stream. To this do-it-yourself principle is added an automatism still under development aimed at highlighting only the most important comments around a certain topic. At the moment, the latter implementation can only be used by a few privileged bodies (the music program The Voice, the American magazine Politico and the British newspaper The Guardian), but, as Mike Isaac of the AllThingsD portal points out, it is an innovation declinable in infinite functions and with enormous potential.
Isaac writes: For quite some time, Twitter has known how powerful events are to its success. But, for many reasons (management and organizational issues, disagreements over implementations, not to mention that big tech problem of sifting through the deluge of junk-tweets to surface and sort the most relevant content), the has accomplished before now. To tell the truth, in the summer of 2012 Twitter had already attempted a first dedicated page project, working in synergy with the Nascar car championships, but the experiment had not achieved the desired results in terms of loyalty and interaction with the public . Poynter's Sam Kirkland notes the value of this new API for automating the tweet selection process: It could have enormous storytelling potential, especially during large events, when it's nearly impossible to manually manage thousands and thousands of tweets.
Live blogging platform ScribbleLive has already done something similar by automatically posting tweets from certain chosen users or those containing specific hashtags, but Twitter is clearly trying to offer something more according to Kirkland: Perhaps it will allow users to filter tweets from those unverified users or those with few followers. Or the new custom timelines will filter out tweets that contain similar language to other tweets or that have been negatively flagged by other users.
Meanwhile, Kirkland points out the main differences between Storify and the new Twitter timeline: On Twitter, comments cannot be added to individual tweets in a single stream, while tweets reported on Storify can be isolated and become narrative in part thanks to the custom comment function. This, added to the fact that "Storify shows the tweets in their entirety, while the new Twitter timeline ironically shows only the reduced and minimal view of the main stream", implies that the younger social network seeks a more direct relationship with the user and stimulate his interaction. Storify's narration is more elastic and open, careful to give a collective and social perspective on each event, extending the principle of Wikipedia, where Twitter is more like the bulletin board of a Facebook profile, careful to give an authoritative as well as authoritarian voice to a single live event.
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