Paper.Li is a content curation website that is built to look like an online newspaper. People tweet articles, and the service scrapes the tweets from Twitter and populates a news page. Tweets often go out that look something like this:
The Dom Daily is out! bit.ly/eAFb33 ▸ Top stories today via @rizzotees
— Dominic Glatzel (@dominicglatzel) May 18, 2012
Typically, I’d be thrilled to have a “top story.” However, something is amiss. Below is a screenshot taken 30 seconds after this tweet went out. Where is my top story?
My article, which was a story about Groupon, was buried way down below the fold. I was able to find it, but it is often quite difficult to actually find your featured article. In such a case, I typically do a command-F and search my browser screen for “rizzotees” in order to locate the article.
I mean no disrespect to Dominic, the publisher featured above. Many Twitter users continue to use the service. But when I see a “top story” tweet go out, as a reader I’ll be looking for the cited story. And as the featured author, I’ll also be looking for the story. If we don’t find it where top stories are usually located (at the top), the entire effort is kind of a misfire. Perhaps Paper.Li is not trying to adhere to any journalistic standards, which would be their choice. My recommendation? Put so-called top stories where they belong. Then, Twitter users who get their tweets featured, and who then see their Twitter username in a tweet will get overly excited when they proceed to your Paper.Li page and find themselves at the top.
Without such changes, the Paper.Li experience falls a bit flat for me.
Chris,
I agree with you that the service seems to fall flat. It has reached the point for me where I just skim over them in my timeline - whether I am mentioned or not.
I also think the UI of the Paper.li site is very hard on the eyes. I don't even want to look at it.
Good stuff!
Greg
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