Take that, Storify! Here’s WordPress’ new tool to create social stories

WordPress has just revealed Media Explorer, a new way to embed social stuff like tweets and YouTube videos in your blog posts.

It’s a more elegant and integrated version of Storify custom-built for WordPress blogs — and that’s an awful lot of blogs. Currently, around 19 percent of the entire Internet is powered by WordPress with monthly pageviews hovering around four billion.

With Media Explorer, you can search for and embed social media based on a serviceable number of criteria — where was the tweet posted, who uploaded the YouTube video, etc.

Here’s what it all looks like:

A WordPress rep confirms the tool is immediately available for WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP users. It will be available in the near future for self-hosted WordPress blogs through Jetpack.

With this launch, WordPress positions itself as a platform with a single feature that makes tools like Storify seem puny by comparison.

For its part, Storify is going deep rather than wide with new products like Storify Business, a pro tool for professional storytellers, community managers, and corporate communications folks.

WordPress.com is run by Automattic, which was founded in 2005 and is based in San Francisco. To date, the company has raised $30.6 million in venture capital.

via VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/28/take-that-storify-heres-wordpress-new-tool-to-create-social-stories/