Hands-on with PostPost: Turn Facebook Into Your Morning Paper

I’m a big fan of the idea behind Flipboard because I like surfing the status updates, links, and images from my (very erudite and intelligent) friends the same way I might page through a magazine or newspaper. However, I don’t have — and don’t want — an iPad. And Pulse, while awesome, doesn’t quite scratch the itch. Plus, there are plenty of people who don’t have and don’t want a tablet at all. (I know you feel in the minority, but there’s nothing wrong with you, I promise.) That’s where PostPost comes in.

PostPost connects with your Facebook account and serves your friends’ links, videos and photos in a newspaper-esque format. Unlike Flipboard, it doesn’t show everything friends post. If the majority of your newsfeed consists of status updates, then PostPost’s offerings are going to be a bit thin. However, if you’re like most people, your friends end up sharing dozens or hundreds of great links, videos, and pictures every day.

When you first load PostPost it pulls in the latest data and arranges it in columns/chunks with the title and image from the pages prominent. You’ll be able to see who shared each tidbit and their comment on it. You can comment on the update or share it on your Facebook page right from PostPost. Once you’ve read everything, just hit Refresh to get new stuff. Users can also filter results to see just links or photos or videos.

The drawbacks for me are that there’s less pulled from the page behind the link than I’d like. It looks like PostPost is only pulling the data in the very short excerpt field from Facebook and not text from the webpage. Flipboard scrapes a more generous excerpt, which usually gets me to click on the link more readily than the short ones on Facebook.

On PostPost you also won’t see how many comments or likes the poster has on that item. Even if you comment, you don’t see any indication of it. And if you want to participate in a conversation, you have to go to Facebook, anyway. For people just interested in the content of what their friends post, this is great. But for those who like to discuss the items, this is less useful.

I can see PostPost being a good tool for those who use Facebook as more of a news aggregator than a place to have conversations. If you fit in that category, head over to PostPost.com to get started.