If you're active on Twitter, you've no doubt run across paper.li, the app that automatically creates a daily "newspaper" based on links within tweets. The concept behind paper.li is pretty straightforward. Users identify a set of Twitter users and/or hashtag topics you want to follow, and paper.li will automatically create and tweet out a "newspaper" spotlighting the key stories linked to in those tweets.
In order to help promote the service (and, in theory, the user who created that *newspaper*), the auto-tweet mentions the twitter names of the users listed on the "front page".
In theory, this is all fine and good. But in reality, no one ever bothers to read the paper.li content. It's simply Twitter spam. In fact, it's generating blog posts like this Boing Boing Post on How to Kill Paper.Li Mentions on Twitter. and frequent tweets like this one from @timbray:
The problem with Paper.li is not that the idea of aggregating links from Twitter is bad. In fact, that's a really useful thing to do (particularly when combined with Twitter lists). The problem is that a personal "newspaper" should be designed for consumption, not for publication to others.
Some of the iPad news apps get this - products like Flipboard do a great job in aggregating and organizing stories based on Twitter links. But the Flipboard publishers understand that it's about determining what you want to read, not about sharing it with others.
For now, Paper.li just doesn't seem to *get* that and that's why they're just Twitter spam today.
