Paper.li brings Twitter closer to perfection

We all know Twitter's shortcomings, but we tend to overlook them because of its  great strengths.

Chief among them is the tap-always-on aspect. The tweets just keep flowing and, if you follow hundreds of people, as most of us do, then even with the use of Hootsuite, Tweetdeck etc to dam the important ones into pools you can dip into later, plenty of them are still washed away without you ever being aware of them.

I'm not suggesting Paper.li is the complete answer, but it is one very interesting one. It takes a snapshot of your Twitter stream each day, and turns it into what it calls a daily newspaper. I'm not sure why they've called it that rather than a daily news website, which is what it looks like.

I've only been experimenting with it today, so there are a lot of questions about how it selects items that I can't answer for now. But what it creates is impressive.

Here's a grab of mine

and a link.

It's interesting to see the categories that it selects for tweets in your stream. I found it valuable in alerting me to significant tweets that I wanted to retweet, but which I'd have missed if it weren't for this application.

One of the many things I like about it is how it mirrors the areas I try to cover in my tweets. Among them: jobs, media and technology, as below.

I was alerted to the app by Journalism.co.uk, which has been checking their paper.li out today too, and was equally impressed.