Paper.li – Create your own online newspaper from Facebook and Twitter

In today’s Social-Media oriented world, if a person can himself chose the content that he wants on a newspaper, one might prefer reading a digital newspaper over a conventional one.

Paper.li, is a useful web app, which can be used to create your own newspaper of Twitter and Facebook updates.

How to use Paper.Li

Paper.li is a service introduced by a Swiss startup called SmallRivers, which can make your Twitter and Facebook streams appear to be like a newspaper. All you have to do is connect to your Twitter or Facebook account and create your own newspaper within seconds !

You can chose the content you want on the paper by selecting a search term, and paper.li will search for all articles,videos and images that contain that particular term on Facebook or Twitter (Two different newspapers can be created for Facebook and Twitter).

You can create a paper for a Twitter hash tag, a Twitter List, or your own Twitter username.

About creating a Facebook paper, you can do so by entering a popular term, and providing keywords.

The newspaper can be given a unique name, of which you become the editor-in-chief, and the people who share the links to that particular topic become the contributors.

Here is a screen shot of a Facebook paper I created titled ‘Egypt’ alongside the #India Twitter paper. Click to enlarge.

As you can see, the paper.li app looks for updates of the particular topic that has been chosen. I really found the look and appearance of paper.li to be well designed and user friendly.

Some drawbacks

1. paper.li allows the display of ads on the paper. Since its a digital newspaper, ads should be minimum or should not be present at all.
2. You cannot create more than 10 papers per user. When you try to create more than 10 papers the following notification appears.



3. Although you can tweet each article on the Twitter newspaper, individual articles cannot be ‘Liked’ on the Facebook paper.
4. Paper.li is updated on a 24-hour basis just like real newspapers, so no real-time updates can be received on your paper.

Alternatives:

1. Tweeted Times is a good web app which can be used to view any Twitter feed in the form of a newspaper. You can ‘Like’ all individual Facebook posts unlike paper.li.
2. PostPost is yet another popular Facebook stream newspaper which has an amazing layout. All the content on your Facebook News Feed is displayed in a beautiful manner on postpost.

Do try out paper.li as well as the alternatives stated above. Would you read something like paper.li every single day? Dont forget to drop in your opinions 🙂

Link: paper.li