The following month, Hotz was hired at Facebook.

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Reportedly, Hotz began work at Facebook as a software engineer in May 2011 and his first day was May 9.  A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the hire but did not provide any other details regarding Hotz’ position or duties.

The news was reported by TechUnwrapped and others over the weekend, citing an interview with Chronic-Dev Team member Joshua Hill (aka “P0sixninja on Twitter). The Chronic-Dev Team, for those unaware, is a group of developers who work to release software for jailbreaking iPhones and other iOS devices.

In a video interview (see embed below), Hill discussed the upcoming jailbreakers’ convention known as MyGreatFest, During the chat, Hill also mentioned that he recently challenged Hotz to find an exploit for the iPad 2, but Hotz turned him down due to his current employment at Facebook, as well as his desire to escape the limelight after his legal troubles with Sony.

Additional confirmation came from Gabe Rivera, founder of the tech news aggregator Techmeme. He did a little sleuthing of his own and discovered that Hotz had announced his employment at Facebook via his Facebook profile. According to this post (viewable by Hotz’ Facebook friends and network only), he began in May and revealed the news to friends in June.

Facebook has yet to officially confirm Hotz’ role with the company, only his hire, but speculation has it that he may be involved with Facebook’s mobile efforts, specifically its upcoming iPad app. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the iPad app, in development for nearly a year, may only be weeks away from release.

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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. 

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.

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Techmeme founder and owner Gabe Rivera shared some info with Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova earlier today, and it turns out that a changeup occurred in September.  About 34 percent of people visiting Techmeme pages now do so using Chrome.

Firefox is four percentage points behind with a share of 30 percent.  Also, Safari has a market share of 21 percent, while Internet Explorer has a market share of 12 percent, if you’re curious.

Then contenders like Opera, Opera Mini, SeaMonkey, and Camino all have shares that just round to zero or one percent.

Anyway, this is less than good news for the folks at Mozilla, since one of Firefox’s key strengths has long been its popularity among techie types.  If they’re now making the switch to Chrome, and the general public’s still content with IE, Firefox could be left in a sort of no-man’s land.

Mozilla fans should cross their fingers that Firefox 4 blows everybody away.

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