They got me at "organized". I'm liking the layout, the neatness of it all, the smart use of metadata. You can create more than 1 daily digest so it's like you're creating a whole stack of newspapers but, unlike the printed form, you can filter the content, the sources, and it gives you a new issue daily without killing another tree :-)
But like any geek with a new toy, I instinctively looked for a link or a button that says "Configure", "Settings", "Customize", or something like that so I could take it apart and redesign the whole thing and customize it more. Alas, that wasn't possible.
Also, the widgets refresh only every 24 hours, which kinda defeats the purpose of being able to read a constantly-refreshing Twitter feed via a cleaner layout (vs. Tweetdeck, for example, which gets the job done but it can be tiring sometimes). I guess the developers tried making up for it with a (hopefully temporary) workaround by embedding live Twitter streams where appropriate and relevant.
Actually, there's pretty much a whole lot that you can't do with your Twitter-based paper.li newspaper.
Why, you ask? The easy answer to that was right under the paper.li logo: the word "alpha". It's saying: "Looks nice, yes? This is what we basically want it to do, and then the rest of it -- we're not sure yet. We're still working on it. But there's more coming up, just you wait and see." It looks useful and promising, so I'm willing to wait.
For now, I'm test-running its widget thingamajig on my blog now. It looks like a newspaper's TOC, which is pretty slick, but I wish I could tweak it a bit more. But then again, I'm holding off on that thought until "alpha" turns to "beta".
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