Barack Obama pushes the button on his first tweet

If you were one of the people shocked and appalled when it was revealed that President Barack Obama never actually used his Twitter account to chat to his 2 million + followers, then you’ll be happy to know he’s now a published Twitter user.

President Obama ‘pushed the button’ on a message on the @redcross account “President Obama and the First Lady are here visiting our disaster operation center right now.” I’d guess the reason it’s in the third person is that it was probably written by someone else, rather than any bizarre third-person view the President has of himself. The next tweet confirmed the historic event: “President Obama pushed the button on the last tweet. It was his first ever tweet!”

It’s interesting that someone persuaded him to tweet on behalf of the Red Cross and perhaps raise a little more awareness and support for their work dealing with the Haiti disaster – it’s got 50,000 followers as opposed to ‘his’ own account @barackobama with over two million, which surely would have raised more funds?

And before anyone starts getting their hopes up that they’ll be exchanging @ replies and DMs with the President himself from now on – I suspect there are still a number of reasons why we won’t see him regularly tweeting – not least the potential security risk of disclosing his location. Which I guess also rules out Foursquare…