Make Twitter Your Daily Newspaper
July 6, 2010
People have been abandoning traditional paper news sources in favor of blogs, Twitter and RSS feeds as their sources of news and information. Visiting all those sources to find the important items can be tedious and time consuming. Now there is a great new solution for viewing them on your iPad or iPhone.
While RSS readers and Twitter clients abound, many may miss getting their news with the format and feel of a newspaper. Website Paper.li is a good way to get custom news in the familiar newspaper format. It connects to your Twitter account and creates a virtual daily newspaper by reviewing posts on Twitter. You feed the website a parameter such as your Twitter username or a specific Twitter list and Paper.li will scan that source for content. The website goes beyond just collecting the tweets. It pulls out images, links to stories and videos and then arranges them by type and subject.
Once all the data is collected and categorized, it is assembled into the familiar newspaper format. It creates sections such as headlines, sports, politics, entertainment news and photos. If there is a popular hashtag in the Twitter feed, it will even create a news section for those posts as well.
Once configured, the paper will be updated every 24 hours. If you sign up in the morning, every subsequent morning you will have a custom made online newspaper waiting for you. You also have the option of signing up on their website to be notified once the paper is updated.
In their keynotes, Apple likes to use the New York Times when demoing a new product, but a website like Paper.li is probably a more relevant example for the news reader of today.
