Whenever I’m online, either at home or at work, I’ll invariably have Hootsuite up. It scrolls a constant stream of tweeters and search topics that are of interest to me: Cloud Computing, Salesforce, Comcast, Robotics, Project Management, Process Improvement. Hootsuite allows me to stay connected with peers and my “social community”, and find new connections with people who share my interests. But even though I’m somewhat selective in who I follow on Twitter, it’s still an extremely high-volume of content. It’s very difficult to keep up with that stream.
Enter Paper.li
Paper.li summarizes all of the content (links, articles, photos, videos) that were shared by the people you follow, and summarizes them into a daily newspaper format. Confession: it felt somewhat pompous to create a newspaper around my own name. I had to get past that, and remind myself that the daily newspaper content isn’t mine – it is stuff that was shared by all the people I follow on Twitter. It’s all packaged up in a newspaper format, delivered to my email inbox daily. The format is much easier to read than scrolling through a twitter stream at the end of the day. This daily feed has become one of my favorite ways to take in news and information.
Paper.li allows you to set the frequency of your newspaper feeds, including a Daily Edition (default), Morning & Evening editions, and a Weekly edition. You can even control the preferred delivery hour. Don’t you wish you had that flexibility with your regular newspaper?.
Paper.li inserts some advertisements throughout the newsletter. The ads are not overbearing or distracting; I’m able to ignore them as easily as I ignore advertisements in a traditional newspaper or magazine.
The result is a daily newspaper that has a refreshing mix of personal interest content mixed in with industry and work-related content. I truly love it!
Creating your own daily Paper.li newspaper is easy:
1.) Navigate your web browser to http://paper.li
2.) Click “Create A Paper” in the top right hand corner of the page
3.) Follow the prompts to create a paper based on:
… your Twitter account: the newspaper will consist of articles shared in the past 24-hours by yourself and the people you follow on Twitter.
… a hash tag (i.e., #salesforce): the newspaper will contain articles shared in the past 24-hours by all Twitter users, who associated that hash tag with the article
… a Twitter @list: select any Twitter list, your own or that of another Twitter user, and get a daily newsfeed of articles shared by those users
Note: If you have taken an approach of simply following EVERYONE who follows you on Twitter, you may want to prune your Following List. The newsfeed is much more relevant if it includes articles promoted by people who specifically share your interests.
Check it out, and let me know if it makes a difference on how you read and manage your Twitter following practices.
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