Paper.li makes a daily newspaper of top posts from your Twitter feed, list or hashtag
Are you afraid of stepping away from Twitter for fear of missing something important in the world of media, gadgets or PR? Do you feel guilty when you step away from the Twitter fire hose to do some real work or attend a real-life event? Paper.li is a site that allows users to create a daily newspaper of articles based on a user, a user list, or a hashtag. The results are displayed daily in a site that looks like a clean, sleek news site.
Instead of reading your Tweets in a dizzying stream, have your key Twitter news selected, organized and delivered to you daily, like a newspaper. It's almost relaxing to read news this way. (Hat tip to my favorite podcast, For Immediate Release, for the link to this site).
I have tried out other Twitter newspaper sites, I should say, but this one delivers.
I tried the service with one of my lists, Social Media Favorites. These are the gurus, local and national, whose Tweets I do not want to miss or lose, even if I can't check Twitter every second. What was amazing to me is that the Twitter paper created from this list came up with a series of articles I'd missed during the day. In fact, this is exactly what I'd like to have for a "newspaper:" all the top links provided by my most respected social media friends.
I'm not sure if anyone else would read this paper, but I can see myself relaxing over it every afternoon on my 3:00 Diet Dr Pepper break, catching up on the key posts I missed while in meetings. I can also see this being very useful for:
- Summarizing key news out of multi-day conferences using the event hashtag (remember the Show Daily print papers they would hand out at conventions and trade shows? Now we can make our own for #SXSW or #Gnomedex and share with those not attending the conference or those who did but didn't want to follow the stream all day.)
- Summarizing key news out of preferred user lists (as seen above)
- Summarizing your own posted news, especially for brands that Twitter prolifically
What about you? Would you convert your Twitter stream, user list or hash tag to a newspaper?
