Danny Whatmough reckons that automated curation is doomed to fail. He takes issue with paper.li and its use of auto-tweets claiming that its “a lazy way to spew out more content”.
I love paper.li and Twittertim.es before it. Creating a media property around content tweeted by your network is incredibly useful. Its personalised media using your network as an editor – and paper.li’s use of a print metaphor to generate a daily version is neat.
Likewise creating Twitter networks around a special interest or event and using paper.li to generate a daily overview of content from social networks is useful.
But Danny is spot on the auto-tweet feature is bloody annoying. It’s a crude attempt to socialise the application and is really no more than social media back-scratching.
It fails because my network is personal to me and therefore so is my version of paper.li. I have never clicked on anyone’s edition of paper.li but my own.
My view? Use paper.li but turn-off auto-tweets.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stephen Waddington and Danny Whatmough, Speed Communications. Speed Communications said: paper.li is useful, but auto-tweets are “social media back… http://goo.gl/fb/0tqAT (@wadds) #media #paperli [...]
I am not sure Paper.li is that useful, it loses the timeliness of Twitter
But that’s to say that immediacy is your only currency. I find a daily summary is useful and I don’t think that its makes the form any less valid.
I really like paper.li, for the same reasons you do.
However, I’ve been running it as a trial more than anything for the past month or so. I think I know what you mean about the auto-tweets. It does seem as if the only reasons for people actually reading them are:
* They’ve been featured
* They’re curious and want to set up their own
The problem is, if you don’t tell people about your paper.li, they won’t visit it!
So perhaps paper.li needs to think about better options for auto-post, say, posting to your blog with a brief summary instead. Or, just do the publicity in the good old-fashioned manual way – actually tell people yourself when it comes out.
Hey, it’s just a new(ish) thing and we need to figure it out. I’m sure it has a place.
Paper.li was picked up by the masses after a few thought leaders in the industry had a play with it. I am with Jeff Jarvis on this one, they are annoying and mostly look the same.
That said they are a good concept for editing real time information, good idea but poor execution.