paper.li

I enjoy Twitter. It helps me stay informed as well as to stay in contact. Still, the info stream can seem more like a raging torrent at times. That, combined with that little time-consuming thing known as “life”, conspires to drown out some of the interesting bits of the signal.

When I tried out paper.li, I wasn’t expecting that it would be anything more than another Twitter app that had marginal utility. It surprised me. Paper.li has helped streamline some of that flood of info in a way that I find efficient and accessible. Here’s an example from a page of mine that it generated:

As you can see, it gathers information from the links of your Twitter feed and filters them so as to present them in a magazine format. Because this is based on people you are following, the content is necessarily slanted to those things you likely have an interest in.

In an effort to maintain some semblance of control with my Twitter feed, I haven’t followed a lot of people that I might. Paper.li provides a way for me to start following more people of interest and still be able to manage the information. It’s been a great addition to my Twitter toolbox.

Who is this not good for? I think people who either follow very few link-posting tweeps, and those who will follow just anyone. For the former, there will just be a dearth of resources to flesh out the content. For the latter, there would be a total lack of specificity. The strength of paper.li is that it’s targeted to you, and that really only works if you have some focus on who you follow yourself.

For me (for now), paper.li is one of the most useful Twitter apps out there. It’s clean, it’s effective, and improves my Twitter experience. I recommend you give it a try to see if it will be as good a fit for you.