• Safety and privacy
• Is Storybird safe?
• Our privacy policy

• Participate!
• Make a Storybird
• Invite your family and friends
• Join our Parent Advisory Board

What’s Storybird?

Storybird is a service that uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families. Two (or more) people author a Storybird—one with words, one with pictures—and then share it with their network. The final product can be printed (coming soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared through a worldwide library.

How does Storybird work?

It’s simple: someone starts a Storybird by writing a few words or grabbing a few images. Then the other person takes a turn, adding more words and pictures. In one or two turns they can finish and share a Storybird. It’s that easy. And they can do it sitting side-by-side or across the country from each other.

Who uses it?

Storybird is designed for families and friends. There’s no specific age limit or range, but we suspect families with kids between 3-13 will enjoy it most.

Why did you create Storybird?

We created Storybird to connect families and friends. Everywhere we looked, people are living apart, working long hours, or separated by travel. Old routines like reading a book together or playing a board game are increasingly rare and new routines, particularly online, haven’t caught up. There are grown up services and kid services—but no service actually connects both groups. That’s where Storybird comes in. We use collaborative storytelling to connect kids and their families.

Why stories?

Stories are the currency of life, particularly in families. Parents entertain and educate their kids through stories. And kids contextualize and imagine the world through narrative. It’s how their brain works. For us, the goal was to design a service that made storytelling effortless.

Are their other benefits to Storybird?

Storybird promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence. Kids who play with words and pictures early in life tend to score higher in cognitive and aptitude tests later on. They read and draw more, and are better able to understand concepts and ideas. Plus, they become comfortable with the act of creation: turning nothing into something. In an idea-based society, that’s a key advantage.

How much does Storybird cost?

Making, sharing, and reading Storybirds online is free. Printing and premium services—when we introduce them later this year—will have a fee associated with them.

Is Storybird safe?

We designed Storybird to be a safe place for kids and their families.

First, we are NOT a virtual world like Club Penguin or Neopets. There is no chat engine built into Storybird, so there’s no way for your child to have a real-time conversation with anyone.

Two, Storybird does NOT create public profile pages for members that reveal their interests, locations, phone numbers, etc. (For one thing, we don’t ask you for your interests, location, and phone number ;) In fact, the only public presence you can have are your stories or the comments you make about other people’s stories. On Storybird, you are what you make—nothing else.

Three, Storybirds can be made private and only shared among people you choose. If you want, you and your kids can have a completely anonymous experience. That said, we encourage everyone to publicly share their Storybirds since sharing doesn’t reveal private information and makes the public library better and better.

Finally, all Storybirds that are shared publicly are reviewed before appearing in the library. If we find inappropriate material, the Storybird is pulled. It’s that simple. And if we miss something, any Storybird can be flagged for immediate review.

Think there are other ways we can make things safe? Let us know.

Our privacy policy

Here are the basics of our privacy policy:

• We support the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
• We only ask for a username and email address. Both are kept private
• We don’t publish or sell your information
• We don’t force you to have a public profile

Here are all the details.

Get involved!

Have some spare time? Want to help the Storybird community grow? Here are some ways to participate:

Make a Storybird

Start now. You can start and send a Storybird in under a minute.

Invite your family and friends

Storybird is even more enjoyable when you spread the storytelling across the family. Why not have grandma start a story about when she married grandpa? Or maybe your nephew can start a Storybird about the whales he loves so much. The more people that join, the more you and your family can celebrate your stories, values, and ideas together.

Invite friends

Join our Parent Advisory Board

The Parent Advisory Board is a small team of committed parents who provide ideas on how to improve Storybird and opinions on features or policy that we’re planning. We rotate the PAB regularly, so sign-up if you’d like to participate. (Realistically, a role on the board demands about 3-4 hours per month for 2-3 months.) Drop us a line if you’d like to participate.

FAQs

A growing list of answers to your questions.

Community guidelines

Short and simple rules on how to play nice.

Help

Not sure what to do? Help is on the way. (Well, if you click on “Help.”)