More than 61,000 questions were tweeted during President Obama's debut "Twitter Town Hall." Not all of them were winners.
President Barack Obama expresses annoyance at the presidential laptop during the "Twitter Town Hall" in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday.
President Barack Obama on Wednesday became the first president to conduct what was called a "Twitter Town Hall," in which ordinary people from around the globe could ask the president questions over the popular social medium and he would answer them.
Questions labeled with the hashtag "#askobama" would come in over Twitter, and the president would say - rather than type - a response and the whole thing was broadcast from the White House over the Internet.
That was how it was supposed to work, but realistically, there are just so many questions anyone can answer in a little more than an hour's time.
In the end, the president answered just 18 questions, a tiny fraction of the several thousands of questions that were asked, according to the Associated Press.
Twitter specializes in short dispatches. Really short. Each individual message - or tweet - can be no more than 140 characters long or else.
That means a single tweet may not be any longer than the preceding paragraph.
Right off the bat, the president's first response was just was over the 140-character limit. Way over. The Associated Press calculated that if the president tried to tweet his first answer, it would have been 2,300 characters long.
At one point, Obama conceded that perhaps brevity is not his strong suit.
"I know, Twitter, I'm supposed to be short," he said.
White House spokesman Jay Carney brushed the criticism aside, saying "He's the leader of the free world. He decides how short his answers will be."
The Miami Herald said that as far a presidential adaptations of technology goes, Obama's Twitter town hall is comparable to FDR's fireside chats over the radio, or JFK reaching out to people over television.
When it was all said and done, 140 characters at a time, the Twitter town hall received 169,395 questions. More than 94,000 tweets, some 61,000 of them questions, were sent during the 1-hour window that the president was fielding questions, according to the Mashable website
Twitter reported the questions could be categorized according to the following areas: Jobs, 32 percent, taxes, 18 percent, the budget, 18 percent, and education, 11 percent.
The remaining 29 percent? Anything goes.
Below is a random sampling of questions picked out of Twitter's #askobama stream. There were undoubtedly countless more.
