What's this Paper.li thing?

Paper.li is the first-ever (well maybe not first, but most successful) online social newspaper. And one of the beautiful things about it is that it gets back to one of the roots of social media—information sharing. Users can search a topic, and Paper.li will aggregate a series of links and pages (formatted to look like a newspaper) that have been shared on Facebook and Twitter relating to that topic.

You don’t need to create an account to view pre-existing papers. However, a more customized paper can be created based on your personal interests when you sign in and sync Paper.li with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can also create a paper based on trending topics by searching a hashtag (don’t know what that is? read our blog post about it!). Users are allowed to create up to 10 personalized papers, and can adjust their settings to automatically share updated editions of their paper with their social networks.

For example, there is a paper all about Electric Vehicles. On the Paper.li website, simply type “Electric Vehicles” into to search box, and click on the first paper that shows up on the search results. Boom- all the current news and topics related to EV Manufacturing is right at your fingertips. You can see what people are saying, what videos are being posted, and get links to external websites all related to the exciting new market of EV’s.

Paper.li is an easy way to view compiled information about, well, anything quickly, easily and in a nice format. But a word of caution: it’s much easier to read papers that have already been created rather than making your own, especially if you aren’t that active on Facebook or Twitter.