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"This post is part of Mashable\u2019s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. \nName: Storify \nQuick Pitch: Pull together content from social networks to create a cohesive story with tweets, posts, photos and videos that maintain their original functionality.\nGenius Idea:  You can find information about almost any topic on social media, but it's not necessarily easy to put that information together into a cohesive narrative. Storify looks to solve this problem by helping you curate stories from the social web.  \nUsers can search for content on social networks and create stories by dragging and dropping components onto a workspace without leaving Storify. When they're finished, they can either link to the story or embed it. \nAll of the tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Flickr images, and other bits of information in the completed story maintain their links and functionality. You can retweet someone's tweet, for instance, the same way you would if you were viewing it on Twitter.\nThe company launched its private beta at the end of September. During its first month since the launch, the tool has been used by bloggers, public relations professionals and media outlets. The Washington Post recently used Storify to compile political candidates' recession and concession tweets. Public relations professionals have used Storify to tell the story of a brand or report their social media efforts to their clients. Other people have used it to blog about everything from family trips to a riot. One man used it to tell the story of a poem he composed using submissions over social media.\nHaving defined some promising potential uses for its product, the company's major uncertainty is the monetization factor. Storify is taking the \"build a user base and monetize it later\" approach, and at this point (admittedly only a month after product launch) it doesn't have any distinct plans for actually making money. Some possibilities include selling advertising that publishers insert in stories or adding premium features. \nWhile the \"monetize later\" approach has worked well for companies like Twitter and Tumblr, it's hard to maintain very long without funding \u2014 which the company is still seeking (they have raised about $30,000 from angel investors).\nBootstrapped status aside, we think Storify is on to something. Co-founder Burt Herman is a 12-year veteran of the Associated Press, and the storytelling aspect of Storify may be what ultimately sets it apart from the competition. Unlike similar social media curation tools like Curated.by and Keepstream, story creators that use Storify can add their own text to the stories. This could make it especially appealing to content providers who want to add analysis and context to social media stories.\nTwo hundred and fifty Mashable readers can try the private beta version of Storify by using the invite code \"Mashable.\"\n\n\n\n\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, jallfree\nSponsored by Microsoft BizSpark\nBizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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