Paper.li a great product we probably don’t need
Paper.li has been picking up quite dramatically recently. You notice that when 5%+ of your twitter followings are publishing daily zines stuffed with all sort of tweet snippets. And you can understand why also: all of a sudden, with no effort and no editorial skills, anybody can publish a newspaper stuffed with interesting and cool stuff – sort of. So you understand the viral aspect: you get excited about the product, you create your newspaper / magazine in literally minutes, publish and tweet and bark around about it. your followers, trusting you, follow the link, and bingo: love at first sight. There you go, create your newspaper with paper.li, shiny and cool, tweet it. It goes full circle. And it duplicates a lot of content (poor Google, its life increasingly difficult with content farms, social networks, spammers, SEOs, and now also effortlessly user generated newspaper).
Only caveat: I don’t really care about your newspaper guys! I might just care about mine, who is an aggregation of tweets of people I follow, and therefore I have something in common with. But about the people my friends follow? It could be cool a day or two, then I get bored. And what’s the point in having tweets published and aggregated once a day? I mean, it took hundred of years to make information travel at light-speed, then we are forcing it into daily chunks. By the time I read paper.li, all those tweets are old, gone, dead.
You might argue that at least paper.li allows you not to miss a single tweet. Well, good luck with that, flipping through pages of tweet snippets in the morning in the quest for that single tweet that could change your day. Not really, twitter, with its very own structure, provide enough redundancy of information that if something is good and important, you won’t miss it. You might get it a few hours late (by a retweet), byt you don’t have to wait a whole day. And if you don’t get it because it is not retweeted, then it wasn’t so much important.
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I agree completely. I can see how Paper.li could be valuable for individuals, but when I see all these Paper.li updates in my Twitter stream, it makes me cringe. It’s just adding to all the noise.
I disagree – I think Paper.li is a valuable tool. I don’t have time to keep an eye on my Twitter stream all day – I check it every 2-3 hours for responses etc. but if I leave it open I large distraction from my normal work.
Being in Australia – Having a daily aggregation of the previous days news from the US early in our morning (for train rides etc.), allows me to open up all the articles that I want to read for the day, which I then cue up in bufferapp to tweet out over my day…