Story platforms launch all the time on the Web, but few have enjoyed the buzz that Storify has. I wrote about it here and here.

In private beta for many months, Storify is finally in public beta — meaning anyone can go to the platfom and create an account to tell stories with social media.

Storify has a journalistic bent rather than a personal or “lifestreaming” slant. The New York Times notes:

Using the Storify Web site, people can find and piece together publicly available content from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and other sites. They can also add text and embed the resulting collages of content on their own sites. During a private test period, reporters from The Washington Post, NPR, PBS and other outlets used the service.

From the Storify folks:

Storify stories have been viewed more than 13 million times on our site and across the Web since our private beta launched at the end of September 2010. We had 4.2 million views just in March, our biggest month yet.

Our private beta users have created more than 21,000 stories. Storify stories have been embedded on more than 5,000 sites — including some of the most-read destinations on the Web like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, CBC, and many other blogs and sites.

Storify is powering an entire show on Al Jazeera that revolves around social media.

You can log onto Storify using a Twitter account.

As I worked on this post, a Storify story with local interest caught my eye. Columbia River Crossing is about the response on social media to the decision to build a “deck truss” bridge across the Columbia River. Although this story consists mostly of tweets, richer and more diverse content is possible on Storify.