Paper.li : From dull Twitter streams to an exciting magazine
My post about “Flipboard”, an iPad application which turns several social media streams into a slick magazine, stirred up some discussions at a local Tweetup. In the article, I complained about the boring feat of browsing through your Twitter stream, which is nothing more than a mere list of links and comments.
While Flipboard turns different predefined and customized social media streams into an iPad flip-able electronic magazine (eMagazine or eZine for short), I was also looking for a web-based solution…
Well, @mongkolroek pointed me to an application which does exactly that: Paper.li
Paper.li takes different Twitter input streams
Paper.li, a free web-based application, takes any Twitter stream and presents it like an eMagazine in a clever and attractive way. You can define the input to come from the Twitter stream of a single user (containing tweets by that user and all people he/she follows), from a Twitter group, or from a particular hashtag.
The data is analyzed, the links are expanded and all is neatly presented in a readable webpage.
Article categories makes reading easier
As in most popular eZines, like The Huffington Post, paper.li categorizes the incoming stream in different sections. Even though the process is automated, it does a pretty good job at it: Multi-media presented in one category, the content of the different links in the Twitter stream are analysed and put, by subject, into different sub-categories.
Take my paper.li paper for instance, and you will see categories like “Business”, “Education”, “Arts & Entertainment”, as well as categories for Twitter tags it finds frequently in my input stream.
Interactivity is built into Paper.li
Taking it a step further, while hovering over each “article”, you can see the original Tweet, and take several actions: You can “reply”, “retweet” and “favourite” the tweet as well as “Follow/Unfollow” the tweep.
The Paper.li eZine for each Twitter stream you have defined, is generated once per day. If you wish to do so, Paper.li can automatically tweet the update from your Twitter account when a new eZine edition is ready.
Nicely done!
You are not on Twitter yet, and hesitate to take the step? Read my tutorial “Twitter for Dummies”.
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
