by Disney’s long been known as the go-to maker of family films, but with Disney Interactive’s new Story app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, they’re hoping families will make some short films of their own. Story, which is free, takes various media on your iPhone or iPod Touch and automatically organizes them into customizable “stories” that you can share with friends and family through Facebook, e-mail, and other venues.
In fact, it seems clear from Disney Interactive’s descriptions that the idea for Story grew out of all those ubiquitous photos of newborns on Facebook. “When we become moms, our iPhone instantly becomes the go-to device to capture the spontaneous moments of family life,” said Brooke Chaffin, the senior vice president Disney Interactive Family. “With Story, we’ve created an easy-to-use app that takes this content and creates meaningful narratives and stories that can be shared with friends and family with just a few taps.”
As TheNextWeb reports, last year Flock achieved a similar effect with the way it scanned your friends’ photos for similar geotags and timestamps, but Story focuses only on the media of one person so as to generate family specific content. Think of it as a much more robust version of Vine. “Stories” can last as long as a minute, they include both still images and videos, and you can customize them with your own captions and themes. Your Stories are also uploaded to iCloud, allowing you to view or edit them whenever you desire.
Ken Yeung at TheNextWeb also learned from Disney that they plan on keeping social media interaction limited to Facebook from now, owing to the privacy restrictions the plaform allows for compared to open platforms like Twitter. “With Facebook, parents could share their photos in a setting where they know their friends can mostly see it,” Yeung said. “However, conscious that other audiences will use it besides parents and mothers, Disney says that it will eventually look at other services like Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.”
Best of all, Story currently has no ads, nor does it feature any discernible references to Disney. That could change in the future, although to what extent is unclear.
