Story Follower began as most other products do, as a simple idea. I was reading an article about a young child that was tragically killed by a stray bullet. As with most local or smaller stories, I knew that unless I accidentally ran across another article about this, I would have no way of receiving information on follow-up articles unless I searched for them on my own manually or created some saved searches. I wondered if it would be possible to build a tool that gives people who read the news a place to submit articles and subscribe to stories that interest them. After a few model changes along the way, I settled on the model you now see.

In earlier versions, the articles were grouped under categories like most major news sources. Categories like "Health, "World," "Sports," etc. After some initial testing I realized that many articles exist outside these categories or in many of them at the same time. What we now have is a way to group a flow of articles under a one storyline. Of course, some articles could belong to multiple storylines, and that is allowed as well.

You are welcome to submit articles from major news sources as well as blogs and local news sites. Obviously, for major news stories you are going to see as headlines all over the place, this may not be as effective. It's more geared toward topics that may not be updated every 15 minutes, but you are welcome to submit and subscribe to any storyline you wish. All we ask is that you create a good storyline title and add relevant articles to it.

This site is still in its infancy and there are many more features to be added in the near future, but you have to start somewhere. Please give it a try and let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

Thanks,
Jason