Is this the future of news?

Using Twitter as a source of news? Like the look of an old-fashioned newspaper? A Swiss startup called Small Rivers has taken that idea and turned it into a service called Paper.li. Here's how it works:

The site takes your Twitter stream and extracts links to any news stories, photos, videos, etc., which it then analyzes using what the company calls “semantic text analysis tools” to determine whether the stories are relevant. It then displays the links and related content in sections based on the context of the link.

The service also creates themed pages based on specific topics using hashtags, such as #privacy or #climate, in much the same way that newspapers create special sections around an event or topic. Paper.li also automatically creates topical sections like Technology, Arts & Entertainment, Photos, Politics and Business. If you hover over the source of each link or photo, you can reply, retweet, follow or unfollow and favorite that user. Users can also now create papers using a Twitter list.

You can see several of these here, courtesy of Gigaom:

• Jeff Nolan (technology blogger and VC — @jeffnolan)
• Umair Haque (director of Harvard’s media lab — @umairh)
• Ross Mayfield (co-founder of Socialtext — @ross)
• Wired magazine (the Wired Daily account — @wired)
• Stowe Boyd (online consultant — @stoweboyd)
• Alex Howard (O’Reilly correspondent — @digiphile)

What’s interesting about using Twitter for such a service, Mathew Ingram notes, is that you don’t have to explicitly say which articles you like, or wait for the software to learn what you’re interested in; you choose the people you follow and those people choose the links they want to share, and that constitutes your newspaper.