Washington: President Barack Obama is facing a stark new challenge: trying to communicate in no more than 140 characters.
On Monday, the famously verbose president started his own Twitter account, promising to engage personally - not through a staff member - with the American people in the often chaotic forum, which has become a kind of global town square for the Internet age.
Obama joined the fray with a short description - "Dad, husband, and 44th President of the United States" - and a picture of him leading a crowd in a commemorative walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in March.
His first post included a greeting - "Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really!" - and a lament, "Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account."
The message went up at 11:38 a.m. Eastern Time, just before the president headed to Camden, New Jersey, to deliver a very old-fashioned in-person speech.
Hello, Twitter! It's Barack. Really! Six years in, they're finally giving me my own account.— President Obama (@POTUS) May 18, 2015
As of the early evening, more than 1 million people had signed up to follow the president's musings. By comparison, his counterpart in Britain, David Cameron, who joined Twitter in January 2010, has just over 1 million followers. Pope Francis, who signed up in December 2012, has just over 6 million.
Obama's trajectory puts him on track toward reaching the heights of such celebrities as Katy Perry, who tops Twitter with nearly 70 million followers, and Justin Bieber, who ranks second with almost 64 million.
And then there is the existing @BarackObama Twitter handle, which was started in 2007 and has 59.2 million followers. It is, however, operated by Obama's former campaign operation and is rarely used by the president. There is also the @WhiteHouse handle, which communicates official missives to its 6.1 million followers.
But the promise of the new @POTUS handle is something different. A White House blog post vowed that the new Twitter account would feature "tweets coming exclusively from" the president. And Twitter users seemed to seize on the notion that Obama might be scrolling through his timeline in his spare time.
One person wrote: "@POTUS can you waive my student loans?" Another offered: "Since Congress is a bunch of ppl shouting opinions at each other, you should feel right at home on Twitter."
A follower named TeaParty925 wrote: "@POTUS Twitter has a 140 character limit. Unfortunately, you have no character at all."
White House aides made it clear that Obama was unlikely to spend much of his valuable time scrolling through thousands of posts. And they said he would not be sending direct messages to his followers. But they insisted that the words on the account would be his.
Sometimes, they said, Obama will type the words himself, as he did Monday, when he was captured in a photo released by the White House. Other times, he might dictate a message to a staff member. In a few cases, officials said, someone else might prepare a post for his approval.
iPhone or Blackberry?
It is unclear what device Obama will use to compose his thoughts. The first message was sent on an iPhone, but aides said the phone belonged to the Executive Office of the President and was not regularly carried by Obama. Officials declined to comment on the president's personal technology, but it is unlikely that he will post messages from his security-hardened BlackBerry.
The officials also declined to say why it had taken so long to have Obama join Twitter. They did, however, offer a reason for his participation: The blog post announcing the account said it had been created to "give Americans a new venue to engage on the issues that matter most to them."
The appeal for Obama seems obvious. He has gone to great lengths to break out of the politically cloistered Washington scene, which he clearly hates. He has scheduled lunches with people who wrote letters to him. And he has occasionally sought to shake loose of the cocoon of protection by walking unannounced to a deli or a coffee shop.
"I'm sort of like the circus bear that kind of breaks the chain, and I start taking off, and everybody starts whispering, 'The bear's loose,'" Obama said last year.
But early indications suggest that the Twitter conversation may be more one-sided than he realizes. As of Monday evening, Obama was following only 65 other accounts, which mostly included the institutions of government: @HUDGov, @USTradeRep, @USTreasury and, of course, his wife's account, @FLOTUS. He was also following several Chicago sports teams, his college alma maters and two politicians: Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush.
But so far, no ordinary people. If Obama spends any time scanning his Twitter timeline on Tuesday, he is not likely to get that outside-of-Washington, bear-is-loose feeling that he so craves. A message on Monday afternoon from the Housing Department noted a $6 million grant to public housing authorities.
White House officials say the list of people and organizations Obama follows will grow over time.
They may want to expand it soon. It took Twitter users little time to point out that Obama was following the schools he attended - Harvard, Columbia and Occidental - but not the University of Chicago, which once employed him and which will support his presidential library.
He was also not following Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate who served as his secretary of state. But then, as of Monday evening, her account was not following @POTUS, either.
Clinton's husband did notice, however. In a Twitter message Monday evening, Bill Clinton welcomed Obama and posed a question.
"Does that username stay with the office?" he wrote, adding a hashtag - #askingforafriend.
