Tapestry offers users a new way to share stories with others. Move forward through each story, which is something a little like a slideshow, via taps. You can’t go backward, only forward, and every time you tap a bit more information or part of the story is revealed.
It sounds so simple, and yet Tapestry’s concept is incredibly versatile, and pretty fun. Let’s face it, sometimes stories or jokes just have more impact when a tap reveals a twist or punchline. Come on, click “more” and I’ll show you what I mean.
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The Basics
You’ll need to create a Tapestry account to get started, which means you will be required to provide an email address and a password. You can also connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts at the same time.
Create a Tapestry account to get started, plus connect your other social media accounts.
Past that, you’ll find yourself at the home screen. In the top right corner you have a search bar, plus a way to access all things relevant to your Tapestry account.
In the top left is the Tapestry icon. Tap it to reveal a menu of different story categories, including Featured, Popular, Entertainment, Inspiration, News and others. Notice that the home screen automatically lands you on the Featured stories.
Whatever kind of story you might be interested in, you’ll find it in one of Tapestry’s many categories.
Scroll to the right to browse different stories. For each one you can see how many likes it’s received, its story category, title, author and hashtags. Find one that interests you? Tap it and the story will be downloaded to your phone.
Reading Stories
The rules for reading stories are: You can tap anywhere on the screen to move the story forward …
Stories can be about anything; they’re limited only by the author’s imagination.
There’s no moving backward …
Share a story, joke, poem, inspiration — whatever message you want to communicate.
And you must finish every story you begin reading (there’s no way to exit until you get to the last slide).
Some of the best stories on Tapestry right now were authored by people to promote their other creative projects.
When you get to the end of a story, you are given the opportunity to like/love it by holding your finger on a heart. The heart then starts to fill up with red (“love,” aw …) and you will lift your finger when you’ve shown the story as much love as you want.
Want to become a Tapestry author? Create your own story using the Tapestry website.
Following that you’ll have the opportunity to bookmark the story, replay it, share it, subscribe to the story’s author or find similar stories you might love. And if you’re wondering whether you can become the author of your very own Tapestry story, good news: It’s possible. You can do so using some pretty slick software on the Tapestry website.
Command Central
You can access a lot of different information from your account. There are several tabs at the top of the screen: Notifications, Saved, History, Profile and Settings.
The Notifications tab is where you’ll receive alerts when your story is featured, your story becomes popular, your story is loved, someone subscribes to your stories, your friend publishes a story, or an author your subscribe to publishes a story. Obviously, for many, but not all, of those to be relevant, you’ll need to publish your own Tapestry story first.
Like a story? Show it some love, bookmark it, or share it with friends.
Under Saved you’ll find all your bookmarked stories, while under History you can scroll through all the ones you’ve viewed. And Settings is where you’ll want to head if you ever need to change your password, edit your notification selections and connect other social media accounts.
The Final Slide
The quality of stories on the app has so far been outstanding. The mechanics of this method of storytelling work best with simple, straightforward visuals, like a few words against the backdrop of a single image or color, and the developers and authors seem to get that.
No way of telling whether or not that will change once the masses get hold of Tapestry and start trying to put up everything from Bieber Fever homages (please don’t) to political drivel (snooze). Maybe the Tapestry team will eventually have to put some kind of stricter approval system in place, who knows.
But as of right now, Tapestry is perfect and the kind of app you could get lost in for days. It’s got stories to make you laugh, to make you cry, to inspire you, to entertain you and to connect you with the rest of your community. And who doesn’t love a good story?