Social media storytelling platform Storify will soon launch in Spanish, French and Arabic, Storify co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman confirmed at a recent Hacks/Hackers meet-up in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“We’re close," Damman said to a crowd of about 100 journalists and technologists at the meetup. “Spanish will be available in the next few weeks.”
Storify, which launched privately in 2010 and to public beta in April 2011, helps writers gather information from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites. Users can add text to stories and then embed them on any website.
The tool has been used by media organizations like The Washington Post, Mashable, and Al Jazeera. Some examples include reporting on events like the Japanese tsunami and the Egyptian Revolution. When New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid died in February, the Times used Storify to remember Shadid and his reporting.
Some 1.2 million people visited Storify in March, according to recently released data. In that same month, Storify’s posts were read 14 million times across all sites. In 2011, it won the grand prize in the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism .
The San-Francisco based startup announced May 14 that it is working with Middle East digital media innovator taghreedat to translate the site into Arabic. According to The Next Web, Taghreedat has enlisted the help of over 2,500 volunteers, with the support of twofour54, an Abu Dhabi based investment group, to translate the interface and website.
In recent weeks, a number of users reported on Twitter that French and Spanish versions of Storify had mysteriously appeared in the interface. Storify apologized for the confusion on Twitter, and said it was busy working on “bringing up international versions.”
Photo credit: Storify's Xavier Damman in San Francisco by mbargo.be