It has been awhile (March) since Part 2 of this series. The convergence of social media and storytelling is hugely fascinating to me, but something prevents me from blogging more about it. Maybe I just want to do it justice.

Although myriad examples of storytelling in social media can be found out there, Heekya is the first one I’ve seen that blatantly states its connection to storytelling. It calls itself a social storytelling platform and claims it will “change the way you create, share, and discover stories.”

Heekya wants to be known as the Wikipedia for stories.

Kristen Nicole of Mashable writes of Heekya:

Currently in private beta, a new service called Heekya is joining this larger development trend [the trend of approaching social media’s potential] with a story creation tool that doesn’t require direct social interaction but taps into the web community as a whole for the rendering of a given project, which can be created and recreated over and over again, by any number of users. In the video below, Heekya gives the example of a friend’s wedding, which is documented by the bride and groom and filled with photos, text and videos.

For the collaborative bit, guests from the wedding can take the Heekya story created by the bride and groom, and add their anecdotes, images, and videos as well. From this stance, a story can be recreated from several different vantage points, and distributed through multiple channels as a custom narrative by each person. Heekya seems rather simple to use, and its import and sharing capabilities will be key to its success—the easier it is for any given editor to pull from their existing content from across the Web, the more accessible Heekya becomes to a very wide range of users.

Over at threeminds, Marta Strickland asks: “Will ‘Social Storytelling’ Hit The Mainstream? She compares Heekya with previous attempts at collaborative storytelling, Penguin Books’ We Tell Stories project and The L Word’s partnership with FanLib to sponsor a contest in which fans submitted scenes. Strickland suggests Heekya may become a more compelling example of exploring storytelling as it relates to the social web.

Here’s a video about Heekya (OK, if the video doesn’t work, go to the source):
Heekya: Wikipedia for Stories from DavidAdewumi on Vimeo.

Nipping at the heels of the Heekya debut is word that Roxio is launching an online storytelling platform.