Are Stories a New Channel?

By Deane Barker
From Issue #38

Squarespace made an interesting acquisition that might imply something about publishing.

Squarespace Buys Unfold To Bring Digital Storytelling Into Its Mix

Unfold is an app to help people create stories for Instagram. If you want to know more about Unfold, here’s a YouTube video (fast-forward to 2:45).

What’s interesting is that “stories” (Facebook and Snapchat have similar concepts) are might be developing enough to rate some generalized CMS functionality. At what point do we accept a “story” as a another channel a CMS needs to account for?

Creative integrators could make any CMS publish to a story, of course, but now we might have a vendor looking to build that in. Will the social and content industries develop enough conventions around stories for them to be generalized? I await the inevitable specification.

Wikipedia doesn’t have a page, but this is in the disambiguation page for “story”:

Story, in social media, refers to a collection of ephemeral auto-playing vertical videos, in which each video typically has a lifespan of 24 hours

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