MyTweetMag, launched quietly in the summer by Hamburg-based Sebastian Schuermanns, is a paper.li-like service that lets users create a ‘magazine’ based on links and other content pulled in from their Twitter stream.
However, where it differs slightly from paper.li is the degree of manual intervention that is required. Instead of automatically culling links from a user’s tweets and those of the Twitter users they follow, MyTweetMag requires that tweets use a specified hashtag, similar to curated services like stori.fy or curated.by. In addition, each ‘magazine’ follows the tweets of the “editor” and up to 5 co-editors only, although the option to multi-author the resulting ‘MyTweetMag’ is potentially quite powerful without significantly raising the barriers to publishing.
So far, so ‘me too’, perhaps.
But one feature that MyTweetMag has that caught my eye and shows some of the possibilities of machine-tagging is a tweet-driven events calendar. In the sidebar of every MyTweetMag is the option to display a list of events pulled in from appropriately hash-tagged tweets by one of the magazine’s editors, which starts with a date. That’s a nice complement to a magazine dedicated to a particular community or niche.
Other standout features of MyTweetMag include a WordPress plugin to add a “real-time” news stream to blog posts, along with support for Flattr, the micropayment-powered “Like” button or tip jar for content. Media links in tweets are also recognised and displayed from Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Twitpic and Flickr.