The Paper.li Daily is out! What Is Paper.li -- and What's the Point?

I'm not sure the website Paper.li does a great job of marketing itself. Few people seem to know what the point is.

Here's what typically happens: You're reading your Twitter feed when all of a sudden, up pops an @mention featuring your name, among one or two others. It reads something like this:

The David L Rattigan Daily is out! http://ow.ly/5fPGX Top stories today by @avalard @mack_ramer @csareb

You're tremendously excited that I decided to include you in my top stories, and you click through and start reading through half a dozen or more pages of links to see where I mentioned you and why. Then you send me an @reply to thank me for including you in the David L Rattigan Daily.

Except, I didn't, really -- or not on purpose, at least. But I admit, I didn't get it for a long time, either.

What Paper.li Does

Paper.li aggregates links automatically from people you choose. To create the most basic "Daily Paper," you log in with your Twitter username, and Paper.li generates a daily or twice-daily list of every link posted by people you follow.

What's the Point?

For me, the point is that even if I don't keep my eye on my Twitter feed every second of the day, I can take a few minutes to scan the list and see, at a glance, all the stories people I follow are linking to and talking about. I don't have to click on each link to see what it's about, because Paper.li automatically generates a title, a summary and an accompanying image, if it's available. So the David L Rattigan Daily is primarily for me. I don't choose every item that goes in; Paper.li does that.

Other Things Paper.li Can Do

You can create daily papers based on other criteria, including Twitter hashtags, keywords or user lists. So, if your interest is Canadian politics, for example, you can create a daily paper that automatically aggregates all the links tweeted with the hashtag #Cdnpoli. Or if you have a Twitter list of best friends and you can't bear the thought of missing a single viral video they link to, you can create a daily that summarizes links tweeted by anyone on that list. You can also combine streams, selecting several keywords as criteria, say.

The Point, Summarized
Basically, I use Paper.li for myself, so I can catch up with what's been happening on my Twitter feed while I haven't been paying attention.

Problems Retweeting Paper.li Links?
All that said, I haven't been using Paper.li as much lately. It still aggregates the links and posts the results to my Twitter account, but I don't check it as regularly. Paper.li used to have a feature where you could automatically retweet any link on the list from within the site. For some reason, this stopped working for me. I can't figure out why, but I doubt it's anything to do with the site deliberately removing it, since it's one of the handiest features. If anyone can illuminate me on that problem, please leave a comment below.