Update: Rivera has elaborated a bit more on the site’s use of tweets in a blog post (blogs aren’t dead yet):
The tweets Techmeme will now link to fall mainly into two categories. First is the news-breaking variety, which directly offer new factual information, whether a straight-up product announcement (example), a new "rumor" report (example, via), a statement containing a veiled announcement (example), or a kind of inadvertently newsworthy announcement (example, via). Tweets of this sort, if interesting enough, will receive fullTechmeme headlines of their own.
The second type is commentary: reactions, responses, rebuttals, endorsements, or amplifications to news stories. Exceptional tweets of this sort may occasionally receive headlines, but more commonly will show up in Discussion, the smaller headlines collapsed by default on Techmeme. Even a tweet simply intended to share a link, if paired with incisive commentary, could show up on Techmeme.
Original Article: Technology aggregation site Techmeme is now accepting tweets as the basis for stories. Founder Gabe Rivera tweeted as much, which is of course the first tweet to take advantage.
We’re now including tweets on Techmeme and this will be the first one. @-reply with something clever to join the Discussion!
Gabe Rivera
gaberivera
In many ways, the move makes a lot of sense, as tweets are widely seen as sources of breaking news (often from the sources themselves). Much of the coverage often linked to from Techmeme points to tweets anyway, so this strategy ought to cut out the middle man in many cases.
The first response tweet to Rivera’s tweet that’s been listed in the conversation on Techmeme declares blogging to be officially dead, but tweeting has always been microblogging, so there’s not really a whole lot of difference in terms of what should be getting on Techmeme. It’s just that a lot of the posts will be a lot shorter, and I don’t anticipate they’ll be throwing out long-form blog posts anytime soon.
It will not be surprising to see the site follow tweet acceptance with the acceptance of upates from other services like Facebook, , Google Buzz, etc. News can break on any of these things (and others). They’ve already used Quora posts, as Rivera points out in the blog post mentioned in the update.
One big advantage of the tweet is the quickness. It takes far less time to tweet than to write an entire blog post, or even take a screenshot of another tweet, so I can see this leading to news getting on TechMeme faster as well.