Storytlr Blog

Hello Storytellers !

You've been asking for it, we've just pushed it live: the bookmarklet ! This is a first iteration, we'll tweak in next release, so please send your feedback. To install, just go in the Tools section and drag the link to your bookmarks.

We also introduce a tighter integration with Twitter. We can now send tweets on your behalf when you post a new item, or when something appears on your stream. Combined with our realtime updates, it means for example that we'll send a tweet as soon as you bookmark an item on Delicious ! Of course, this is all configurable to avoid spamming your followers.

Twitter is the most used data source on Storytlr, so we improve the service by supporting Twitpic and Phodroid. The pictures are displayed in your stream and can be used in stories. We'll add support for more third party services built on top of Twitter in the coming releases.

If you want a robust comments management, you can now use Disqus to manage comments on your page. Thanks to Disqus, you get comments spam protection, moderation, central management, and even video comments using Seesmic !

Finally, we also continue to expand our support of external data sources, this time with Identi.ca and Laconi.ca support. We even have realtime notifications for Identi.ca thanks to Gnip !

We've also taken the time to tweak a few things across the various themes, and to fix various bugs. This won't have been possible without your help, so a big thank you to all of you ! Please keep sending bug reports, frustrations, and ideas to help us make storytlr a better service !

We hope you like it ! Please share your thoughts in the comments below, by email, on twitter, or on our feedback forum. Thanks again for your support. Stay tuned for release 7 mid-February !

-Laurent & Alard

We never anticipated this type of use for storytlr but journalist Kevin Sablan included many different web 2.0 sources that covered the hudson crash and created a compelling story (see below) as part of his blog post. This 'citizen journalism' story assembled by a professional includes tweets, news footage, twitpic images and youtube movies.

Previously Arne Hulstein created a story on a bank robbery he witnessed. The little details (police using macbooks) give an unexpected perspective to such a serious story that would be covered differently in traditional media.

Is this is a new way to consume big news events? If this type of story makes sense, we may need to rethink storytlr for news events. I'm thinking mentioning sources in the story, maybe even event related accounts to avoid all this noise on your stream. What do you think?

Alard & Laurent

Today we tried to push a new release live, our goal was to introduce a new caching layer and set of SQL optimizations on which we have worked for the past weeks. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned.

A few minutes after being live again, we started to see strange effects on the database, missing records, disapearing stories, and other weird artifacts. It soon became obvious that we had missed something in the cache layer and it was not possible to fix this quickly on the live server. We therefore decided to roll back to the pre-release status.

So, the bad news is that we have to go back to our garage and fix the caching bit, it will take us some time, which means we won't work on new features for a while. We also need to spend time investigating a new hosting solution to avoid the downtimes such as last week.

As you know, we are just two guys in a garage doing this for fun, so we appreciate your patience while we learn, and improve our service. We are commited to sustain our growth, and will solve both the speed and the availability issues in the coming weeks !

Thanks all for your support,

-Laurent & Alard