Everyone loves a good story and everyone has a story to tell. For the last several days I have had the true pleasure of exploring a new venture, Intersect, that aims to help people find good stories and tell their own.
Intersect, currently in “really beta,” allows users to create a personal storyline beginning with the publishing of your first story on the site. The neat thing about Intersect is that the content does not have to be your own. If you find something interesting penned by another, you can add it to your storyline by “borrowing” it.
Once your story is complete, you can tag public stories with a time and a place, creating an intersection. In doing so, others can easily discover your story even if they don’t know you personally. By exploring storylines and intersections, users can learn more about the people and places they already know, and about the people and places they have yet to discover.
A quote about Intersect from Stephen Buckley, Dean, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, really emphasizes what drew me to explore the site further:
“Intersect.com’s genius is that it reminds us that our lives are more than just disparate, transitory facts or opinions. It reminds us that, even on the Web, we are a collection of our endeavors and memories—our work and play, our loves and losses. Intersect taps into our hunger to share those experiences in a coherent, compelling way—to be a part of a meaningful community through the simple power of stories.”
What does Intersect look like and what are its many features? Pleased you asked, more pleased to answer.
Below is one Intersect user’s storyline, annotated with a select few of the many features of Intersect:
Right now, all users upon gaining access to Intersect will receive one storyline. In the future however, Intersect plans to allow users to manage more than one storyline. For example, a user might have a personal storyline, plus one or more storylines centered on a specific issue or topic, where some of the content comes from other Intersect users who’ve told public stories.
One of my colleagues, Alex, at TNW who shall remain nameless, asked how Intersect differs from a service such as Storify. Storify tells stories using “social media such as Tweets, photos and videos. You search multiple social networks from one place, and then drag individual elements into your story. You can re-order the elements and also add text to give context to your readers.”
Storify, while a novel idea, lacks the originality and consistency that Intersect offers. Intersect is a constantly evolving, yet sequential, storyline of a user’s life, as they tell it, while still providing one the opportunity to connect with others telling equally compelling stories. With Intersect, the searching of multiple social networks is not required to compile information or facts to present to the world like one must do when using Storify.
If you want to start telling your story, we have invites for you! The first 500 people who send an email to [email protected] and put The Next Web in the subject line, will have first crack at starting your own storyline and discovering those of others.
Want to know more about Intersect? Check out this slick video that tells you all you need to know in 2 minutes:
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