TechMeme has announced that it is officially incorporating Twitter into its process for gathering and publishing news.

According to TechMeme’s Gabe Rivera:

Often there are Techmeme readers aware of great stories that have fallen through the cracks, or are taking too long to appear on Techmeme. So I’ve long wanted to enable news tips, but the question remains: how best to receive them? Though forms or a special email address might work, today we begin by receiving tips over Twitter.

If you’ve been reading Techmeme, you know all about Twitter, which lets you send short messages to other Twitter users who have opted to “follow” you. It’s like blogging but with the immediacy of instant messaging, plus a whole stable of desktop and mobile applications built around the service. While Twitter isn’t as mainstream as Facebook, it’s already mainstream among bloggers and many people ahead of the curve on breaking news.

Techmeme already posts headlines to Twitter, through Twitter accounts Techmeme, which includes only the bigger stories of the day, and TechmemeFH (Techmeme Firehose), which includes every main headline that hits the site (the clear choice for tech news junkies). But until today the tweets have gone one way: from these accounts.

To send a tip to Techmeme, just include “Tip @Techmeme” in your message along with the URL of the news story you’d like to appear.

Tips will be processed through a combination of automated and manual means, and if you were the first person to tip Techmeme about a story url, your Twitter id will be credited on the homepage of Techmeme if the story is posted. The credit will appear beneath the posted headline, after “Discussion” links.

TechMeme is already one of the most interesting hybrids of software and human news gathering and publishing, and TechMeme Tips promises to make Techmeme even more timely.

Watch for a new class of TechMeme Tip superstars to rise up, much as you see on Digg.

Do you think TechMeme Tips will be an important part of the future of newsgathering? Or is this something that only tech geeks will care about?