14 DAY TRIAL // Techmeme, a popular aggregator and discovery tool for technology news, has made a big change and will now be including tweets as main headlines or as part of the discussion. Techmeme is a great way of getting an overview of the hottest stories of the moment, but the focus has been on blog posts, news articles or slightly more formal announcements.
"For as long as newsmakers have used Twitter, tweets have broken news stories. And yet for Techmeme, linking directly to tweets was never imperative - after all most newsworthy tweets are blogged within minutes, moreover with helpful context," Gabe Rivera, the founder of Techmeme, wrote.
"But still it seemed as if something was missing in passing over tweets: we'd miss the first few minutes of certain developing stories as well as opportunities for including good commentary," he explained.
"We also missed the chance to let certain sources simply speak under their own byline. And so, at last, we've begun incorporating tweets on Techmeme. Our first tweet as a main headline is here, and appears below," he announced.
This doesn't mean that Techmeme will be overrun by tweets from now on, tweets added to discussions will be rare and headlines even rarer. Only certain types of tweets will make it through.
To qualify as a headline, a tweet would have to break a news story. Tweets coming from official sources, announcements or important commentary from key people, or something that generates a certain amount of interest in the tech world may be chosen.
For the discussion, the tweet generally has to carry some weight and be relevant to the story to be included. Of course, all of this is highly subjective, but that's Techmeme's job in the first place. Tweets will get to be chosen via the same process as regular news entries, automatically through Techmeme's algorithms or human curated.