Paper.li is an application that can make any Twitter feed look like an online newspaper website, complete with headlines, photos, articles, and a newspaper-style layout. Designed for users who enjoy utilizing the capabilities of online newsfeeds but miss the look and style of old-school newspapers and print magazines, Paper.li allows users with diverse interests to create customized daily newspapers filled with the information that matters to them most.
To create a Paper.li newspaper of your own, sign in with your Twitter account and enter the name of a fellow user whose updates you enjoy reading. Immediately, Paper.li will begin importing the most interesting news stories put out by your chosen user and his or her followers that day, as determined by the number of retweets and other formulations created by Paper.li. Once your newspaper is ready, you’ll see a familiar layout with large headlines, one paragraph of text, and a small avatar in the left hand corner below each article indicating which Twitter user initially brought the popular story to light. Hovering over the Twitter avatar creates a popup showing the user’s original tweet and includes links that allow you to reply, retweet, follow, or unfollow the user from within the Paper.li site. Meanwhile, clicking on the headline of an interesting piece takes you to an outside news source, where you can read the article in full.
For news junkies who prefer to check out other people’s newspapers without necessarily creating their own, Paper.li offers the option of searching for previously created newspapers by topic and signing up for email notifications whenever the next edition is available to view. For Twitter users who don’t have enough time to sift through hundreds of updates each day, Paper.li presents a simple way to stay up to date on what people are talking about right now.
Practical Uses:
- Read about the biggest news stories of the day
- Create a newspaper filled with the information that matters to you most
- Stay on top of current events without wasting time scrolling through endless feeds
- Find out which stories people will be talking about at the water cooler tomorrow
Insider Tips:
- Sign up for email notifications to be alerted when new editions are published
- Search tags to find other newspapers you might enjoy
- Choose to view articles in a standard list format, rather than in a newspaper layout
- Retweet your newspaper to share it with others
What we liked:
- Saves users time by only posting the most talked about stories of the day
- Each Paper.li newspaper has its own permanent web address
- Clean design and layout make it easy to skim stories and find what looks interesting
- Helps people find interesting new users to follow on Twitter
What we didn’t like:
- Paper.li pages can sometimes be slow to load
- New editions come out only once each day
- The user interface is somewhat bland
Alternatives:
- feedly – http://www.feedly.com
- Zite – http://zite.com
Company Info:
- Launched: April 2010
- Privately Held
- Headquarters: Lausanne, Switzerland
- Founded by: SmallRivers
- Web site: http://paper.li
Costs:
- Free
All articles are curated and personally reviewed by Dave Onkels. Dave is tech addict and has a passion for rich web applications. He has cultivated several tech startups and runs
This is a great review, and thanks for offering alternative solutions.
This is something new….i like it