Capitalizing on the Paper.li Craze

Posted by Gabe on November 10, 2010 under Twitter | 8 Comments to Read

If you have been active on Twitter over the last few months you have probably noticed it. You have seen tweets like “The ‘My Paper Is Awesome’ Daily is Out. Top stories by @OpieTaylor @AuntBee @BarneyFife.”  Of course this is a fictitious example but you get the idea.  This is a service that converts tweets of people you follow, lists or hash tags into a newspaper type format (see paper.li). At first after taking a cursory look at it I thought it was kind of neat.  I didn’t know how it worked, but assumed people took an effort to select the “headlines” that they liked.  Since we were recognized by Mashable we have been featured in many of these posts as of late.  One of my followers even featured the same link for three straight days.  I started taking a closer look at these posts, and saw that in the media section our Twitter EBook (PDF) was also being featured almost every time.  Wow, I thought. People are really taking an interest in my stuff!

Then I started taking a closer look.  I didn’t go so far as to create a paper myself because as I learned, it’s automated.  To what degree, I’m actually not sure but I assume that it grabs tweets that happen to be in the creator’s list or hashtag’s timeline of when the paper is published and picks videos, pdfs, links to publish in an automated fashion.  (If a reader has a better explanation please add in the comments.)  Why I think this is true is because I had not tweeted the ebook link this morning and it was not showing up in the media links.  As soon as I did I found it in the next “paper”.

I won’t attempt to describe myself exactly how it works but I will offer a post written by someone else on the subject.

I am still deciphering in my mind what to think about all this.  Here I had been thanking people for including me when they never personally selected anything I wrote.  That I guess is part of the attraction to have a daily paper.  It’s kind of urging me to tweet videos and our ebook more often as I now know it has a better chance of showing up in someone’s paper.  I guess that’s good for me but I really don’t think this will work in the long run.  So many people are using it the novelty has now worn off.  I also I think that my followers will certainly get tired of me tweeting the same links over and over.

Regular readers of my blog will note that as of late I have not been writing about Twitter.  All these posts have gone “straight to DVD” or as in my case our ebook.  The reason why I didn’t do it this time is because I feel that within a few short months this Paper service will fade away.  Now that I know how it works I have less interest in other “papers”.  If I sent out a link every day that read, “Here’s a random sample of what my followers are saying” would you click on it each day?

So I guess I should be thankful for people at least including me in their lists to be eligible.  I think of this service as a sophisticated retweet.  Since I am pretty discerning as to what posts I retweet I will not be creating a paper.  But that doesn’t mean I will not send out a few extra links to take advantage of the craze while I can.  Would love to hear what you think of this new service.