President Barack Obama’s Twitter Townhall would have been more interesting if he had answered tweet for tweet.
Instead it looked a lot like an old-fashioned interview except the questions came over the transom on Twitter. 
Of the tens of thousands of questions posed at #AskObama the ones chosen allowed the president to chew over long-standing talking points but offered little new insight. It might have been worth asking at least one fun question off the well-trodden policy path.
The White House did get into the novelty of it, inviting 140 guests to match the 140 characters allowed in a tweet. And Obama started off the event by tweeting from a laptop with a presidential logo set up on a stand.
But that was the last time during the event that he issued anything so brief. If his spoken answers had been tweeted in full they would have gone way past the red zone that signals over the limit on Twitter.
Did you tweet what you had for breakfast today? If so, that bagel and coffee are now immortalized, sort of, as the Library of Congress has acquired the entire Twitter archive. Billions of 140-character musings, some 55 million tweets a day, just waiting to be read. You may wonder if anyone reads your tweets, but at least they’ll be in good company.
Basically all White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had to do was turn up … and they followed by the thousands.
er, its princess.
