What interesting links, blog posts, videos and photos are being shared on Twitter by Bill Gates, TechCrunch, the WWF, Stowe Boyd, Fred Wilson, the New-York Times AND the people they find of interest? This is what SmallRivers' Paper.li project is all about: turning a Twitter stream into an easy to read daily newspaper.
Twitter is currently a simple and fast way to point others to content of interest on the web. Twitter users do so millions of times a day, effectively giving their followers a glimpse of what they think others should see or read. Next to having followers, any Twitter thus follows others, generally a group of people they deem of interest and want to keep track of what they have to share. Any Twitter user is thus a kind of editor in chief, with the people they follow being trusted journalists. The sum of what is shared by them is thus a unique perspective of what is deemed of interest on the web on any given day. A bit like a newspaper.
Having a list of links that are being shared on a given day by a user and those he/she follows is not enough. We analyze all links for topic (Politics, science, technology...) using semantic text analysis tools, extract the content (text, video, images, pdf, ...) and rank them for probable pertinence. With all of that info we are then able to create a newspaper front page. If such quick scanning is not enough, you are also able to access a table view of all links shared in the last 24 hours by a user and those he/she follows.
Paper.li has just launched in alpha (this means work in progress). It's quite simple really. Find the Twitter account that interests you and read it newspaper-style. If it hasn't been created yet, login using your Twitter or Facebook account, enter the Twitter username and press create - several minutes later the newspaper is ready for reading.
We are encouraged by what we see and the first feedbacks we have received. As always, we need you to enhance the service, so please don't hesitate to use comments below to share your ideas and wishes.
2 comments:
I really like the paper.li the only challenge that I have in using it at the moment is that when I produce the paper for our company we keep seeing a competitors ad in one of the two Google ad spaces that you have in the paper. I suspect that is because that competitor is buying ad space in the Google content network.
We would happily retweet and post the paper on FB but not with the current likelihood of our customers seeing our competitors ads.
Any chance of fixing that?
Very, very cool idea. I've had similar ideas in the past, and I've been waiting for someone to do this. I think you may be the first. I've already made my Paper.li site my home page: http://paper.li/pachecod
Dan Pacheco
Founder & CEO, FeedBrewer.com
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