MacIVER THINKING, INC.

Paper.li is one of a handful of services on the web at the forefront of “social news curation.” Essentially, you are the curator of your Twitter stream and you get to publish all the news shared by you as well as your followers. One of the best features of paper.li is that it aggregates the news in a way that allows you to peruse the news at any time, which means you don’t have to sit and watch the Twitter stream all day. 

According to Mathew Ingram and his sources, Paper.li is a service from a Swiss company called Small Rivers, which pulls in your Twitter stream and extracts any links shared by those you follow, then displays those links in a newspaper-style format. Small Rivers is venture-backed and creates three main services under the umbrella: one vision, one platform, several applications. It does this as a way to “connect people around shared interests.”

Examples (Please note the formatting):

http://paper.li/AbsolutePA

http://paper.li/knealemann

http://paper.li/chrisbrogan

http://paper.li/DannyBrown

It is a neat service and many of the people I follow on twitter are dipping their toe in the water to see how paper.li works. As one of my Twitter collaborators, @knealemann, says: “Part of the journey is experimentation.”

One of the issues that has always been a concern for me about the wild-west nature of the World Wide Web is transparency. In its early days c. 1991, experimentation was critical, as it was the only way to learn what were the capabilities and the capacities of the Web. Today we know a great deal more, and although experimentation is still critical to the success of any new venture, we should still be concerned about the transparency issue. And, now that the Web has developed into a stable platform for self-publication, social networking, interaction, and, yes, even advertising, transparency is the only thing that will allow us to understand intent.

My concern with paper.li is that it fails to say on its site or anywhere I can find on its parent site, Small Rivers, that it is aggregating the content to generate revenue from Google’s AdWords. It parses the “sharing” into relevant ad words that generation content on each and every personal paper.li published. It even takes the data and makes it relevant to the local market where the paper.li is published.

Who gets that revenue? How do the people who are using the service get their fair share? And what is the path we should use to follow the money? Because this is one service that ads up, it is important for the end users to know exactly how the things they create are used and for whom they are making money.

MacIVER THINKING