When I began to delve into the Storify app, it quickly became clear that there were two reviews to write. There's the app itself -- a sophisticated, deceptively powerful tool with the kind of rich details Steve Jobs envisioned when designing the iPad (there is no iPhone version); and then there's the fledgling platform, which weaves your social-media services into a living tapestry of tweets, posts, photos, and videos.

Since I was new to both, I couldn't properly review the app -- or really figure out how to use it at all -- until I learned what Storify was. Equal parts blog and network, Storify cuts and curates pieces from various social circles and presents them as semi-linear, dynamic "stories," which can then be shared and embedded across the web. Finished products look something like a term paper by someone who doesn't quite understand footnotes, but Storify's unique organizational skills bring social media to life in a way your Twitter timeline and Facebook Wall cannot.

But I didn't appreciate Storify's full potential until I used its iPad app. The tablet version mirrors the site's powerful, multimedia search capabilities and drag-and-drop interface, but strips it all down to its barest essentials. Stories are created by dragging any number of clippings from the sidebar onto the storyboard -- a process that felt much more immersive and captivating with my fingers than with a mouse. The animations are polished and slick, especially following the latest upgrade to support the new iPad's Retina display, and searches are lightning-fast.

Since Storify is fairly new to the iPad game, I expected to find a few bugs. Crashes were fairly infrequent after a mid-review update, but search hangups and freezes were a bit too persistent, even on the new iPad. A few minor issues with duplicate stories popped up along with way, and logging into Twitter returned an error message (even though it allowed me to access my account).

The bottom line. Storify is a novel way to get all of your social networks on the same page, but the real story is its iPad experience.