4 Ways to Read Your Social Media Updates as Newspaper

Social media updates have turned into constant stream of important news and interesting stories. With our social media connections constantly increasing, how not to get lost in that information overload?

The traditional media style may be the answer… All the four tools I share today pull your social media friends’ (Twitter and Facebook) updates, re-arrange and re-group the links and stories and perform them to you in an easier to scan, more usable ways.

There may be additional ranking and categorizing mechanisms involved or that me just pure re-arranging style – in either case, the following tools let you easier consume the information shared by your friends and offer an absolutely new social media experience. Enjoy!

1. Tweeted Times

Tweeted Times aggregates news in your Twitter stream and ranks them by popularity among your friends. You can create a newspaper based on your Twitter stream, any Twitter list and Twitter search results.

Updated: hourly

The Tweeted Times rank the news based on how many of your friends and friends of your friends have shared the Tweet.

The tool allows to subscribe to the updates via RSS as well as easily tweet and share on Facebook any of the updates that have made it to the newspaper.

There are also a few very interesting discovery tools that help to track most popular Twitter searches, Twitter lists and Twitter users:

2. Paper.li

Paper.li allows to create a newspaper based on your Twitter account, any Twitter hashtag, Twitter list and your Facebook account. Besides automatic aggregator that collects, groups and ranks the social media updates, you can also add your editorial comments to any of the updates.

Updated: daily

The Twitter / Facebook updates are grouped by media types (photos, video, text). The latter is also automatically sorted into thematic categories based on a very-well performed semantic analysis:

Paper.li thus semantically analyzes all URLs shared with the user, and assigns a topic (e.g. Technology, Health, Art, Environment, …) to each. This is how Paper.li can provide topic sections in each paper.

Besides that, the internal algorithm performs “Contextual relevancy ranking” which is used to determine the relative importance of content items.

Apart from doing a very good job in breaking the news into topics, the Paper.li can be used as a great community building and content marketing tool:

• Content marketing tools: Users can subscribe to each newspaper by email (Moreover, daily views and overall subscription count is a public information for each newsletter);
• Promotion tools: Users can embed the interactive widget with the newspaper to their blogs;
• Community building tools: The owner (as well as any reader) can enable daily Twitter summaries that tag the authors of top stories (which keeps bringing your friends back to you and your brand):

3. FlipBoard

FlipBoard is a “social magazine” for iPad that makes social media updates from friends much more fun to go through. Basically, the application does nothing but pulling the updates from the connected sources and re-arranging them in an easy-to-navigate format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

Updated: every 10-15 minutes (or so)

The application has its own built-in sections (like FlipTech, FlipFilm and FlipPhotos), but you can also create new ones based on your Facebook and Twitter timelines, Twitter lists or users.

The application offers a smooth “flicking feel”: flicking a finger across the screen takes you to the next batch of articles.

The app creator and co-founder Mike McCue nicely summarizes the whole today’s overview,

“We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream”.

4. PostPost

PostPost compiles all the links, videos and pictures your friends post on Facebook into a real-time newspaper. The tool doesn’t come equipped with any semantic or ranking algorithm. All it does is giving you an alternative (probably easer to grasp) view of your Facebook timeline and embeds media in a clearer way.

Updated: live

PostPost is integrated with yolink search which dives behind all of the links on your PostPost page and finds information that you’re searching for.

Putting it all together:

* I wasn’t able to find any official data on this, so that’s based on my own observations.

Are you aware of any other similar apps? Do you find them useful? Please share your thoughts!

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