Paper.li, Create Your Own Twitter Newspaper
A Twitter newspaper? How can that work considering that Twitter limits the number of characters to 140? That were my questions when I first heard about Paper.li, a web service that offers to create said newspapers for users of its website.
Users who want to create their own newspapers need a free account, that they can create either with a Facebook or Twitter account. Those accounts are just used for verification and will not be used to create the Twitter newspaper.
Once the account has been created users can click on the Create a newspaper link in the top header to create their first Twitter newspaper.
Here they can create the newspaper based on the posts of a Twitter user and followers, a Twitter tag or a Twitter list. The newspaper is limited to one tag, list or user, and every registered user can create a total of 10 newspapers.
The next step depends on the popularity of the selection. New tags, users or lists that have not been processed by the service yet need to be created first, which can take up to 24 hours before they are populated.
Popular tags, like #windows7 for instance are available immediately.
The newspaper lists Twitter messages, images and links to websites on its page. This concept actually works better than thought, even though there is no language filter to only display languages that the user understands.
Papers are automatically updated by Paper.li with options to configure alerts to receive notifications whenever an update has been processed.
Paper.li offers an interesting concept, that currently falls a bit short because of the non-existing filtering options. It would be helpful if users could create filters for languages, users and tags so that they do not appear in the newspaper. An option to use multiple tags, lists or Twitter usernames would also be helpful.
Users who want to try out Paper.li can visit the project homepage to create their own Twitter newspaper, or read newspapers of other users.
Advertisement
This is a great idea for generating a newsletter for your websites that interacts with Twitter. I’m encouraged. Hopefully, paper.li will incorporate some of the more useful features you indicated in the article, since right now it looks like you’d be populating some content that’s not as specific or relevant as you’d like. The ability to use multiple search terms for more specific content would be particularly useful, to me.
Nevertheless, this could bring in significant traffic and generate more conversations based on your aggregate tag, list, or user. I’ll be sure to give this one a try soon.