Update: The White House began tweeting around noon Eastern time on Friday. There’s also a new whitehouse profile on MySpace.
The usernames match those of the previously launched “whitehouse” accounts on YouTube and Flickr. The Obama administration has since announced its initiative as “WhiteHouse 2.0.”
Since the day Barack Obama took office as President, I’ve urged him to keep up his eager use of Twitter. The fast-growing micro-blogging site had helped drive his campaign, both as a fundraising tool and as proof that the candidate had a firm grasp of the new, participatory Internet. But Mr. Obama’s Twitter feed has only been updated twice since he took office on January 20th.
Good news: He’ll be back, and soon, this time at twitter.com/whitehouse. What’s funny is that the President’s new feed has been hiding in plain sight since January: “Welcome to the official Twitter page of the White House.” Here’s a screenshot from Thursday afternoon:
President Obama’s staff is in the process of migrating his Twitter username from the campaign’s “BarackObama” to the more Presidential “whitehouse.” The name change will allow White House staffers to do the President’s tweeting for him without appearing disingenuous. The geeky use of all lowercase letters is a nice touch.
I’ve been unable to confirm whether or not Mr. Obama will type some of the status updates himself. But even with two wars, an economic crisis and swine flu taking up his day, an occasional tweet from the world’s best-known BlackBerry user would be a quick, easy, Web 2.0 version of FDR’s fireside chats. I’ve already clicked in my follow request.
Source : The New York Times
The usernames match those of the previously launched “whitehouse” accounts on YouTube and Flickr. The Obama administration has since announced its initiative as “WhiteHouse 2.0.”
Since the day Barack Obama took office as President, I’ve urged him to keep up his eager use of Twitter. The fast-growing micro-blogging site had helped drive his campaign, both as a fundraising tool and as proof that the candidate had a firm grasp of the new, participatory Internet. But Mr. Obama’s Twitter feed has only been updated twice since he took office on January 20th.
Good news: He’ll be back, and soon, this time at twitter.com/whitehouse. What’s funny is that the President’s new feed has been hiding in plain sight since January: “Welcome to the official Twitter page of the White House.” Here’s a screenshot from Thursday afternoon:
President Obama’s staff is in the process of migrating his Twitter username from the campaign’s “BarackObama” to the more Presidential “whitehouse.” The name change will allow White House staffers to do the President’s tweeting for him without appearing disingenuous. The geeky use of all lowercase letters is a nice touch.
I’ve been unable to confirm whether or not Mr. Obama will type some of the status updates himself. But even with two wars, an economic crisis and swine flu taking up his day, an occasional tweet from the world’s best-known BlackBerry user would be a quick, easy, Web 2.0 version of FDR’s fireside chats. I’ve already clicked in my follow request.
Source : The New York Times
