Richard Martin Blog: The Age of Twitter Diplomacy

I have to say that there was something disheartening about President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia, land of Chekhov and Dostoevsky and Nabokov, sending out the following as his very first tweet:

“Hello everyone, I’m now on Twitter and this is my first message.”

So, it’s not Lolita. But hey, what do you expect in 140 characters or less? The blogosphere, naturally, responded to Medvedev’s visit to Twitter HQ yesterday, and his setting up of the @KremlinRussia account, as if the cure for cancer had been discovered. Twitter officials predictably patted themselves on the back, as they’d joined Cisco and Apple as the obligatory stops on a What’s Happening Now tour of Silicon Valley. Even President Obama got into the spirit of things, remarking that now that he and his pal Dmitry are both now on Twitter, "We may finally be able to get rid of those red phones."

Yuk, yuk. Like his often-medieval country, Medvedev is hardly on the technological cutting edge here: Twitter helpfully posted a list of the world leaders currently tweeting away, a select group that includes not only Barack Obama, Malaysia’s Najiv Razak, Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia, Queen Rania of Jordan, but also Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who joined on April 27, quickly became the most-followed tweeter in his country, and reportedly has a team of 200 fielding and replying to Twitter messages. A sampling of President Chavez’s tweets indicates that he’s not using the platform to post his usual anti-U.S. tirades, but actually attempting to engage his constituents.

Twitter, the platform, has had tough spell, even before the Kremlin got in on the act, what with rabid World Cup fans and all. The company said on its blog on June 15 that, “From a site stability and service outage perspective, it’s been Twitter’s worst month since last October.”

“Twitter ground to a halt again on Wednesday, just minutes before Mr Medvedev visited the company,” reported The Financial Times. “Once again the service was overwhelmed with tweets, this time because the US had just beat Algeria and advanced in the World Cup.”

As for President Medvedev, he is hardly using Twitter just to josh around with his new pal Barack. On Thursday, The English-language Moscow News reported, he tweeted the end to an international conflict: “The end of the short gas war with Belarus was just as brief: it was all over in a mere 54 characters on Dmitry Medvedev’s brand-new Twitter page,” The Moscow News said. “Minsk paid off its debts and Gazprom resumes supplies to Belarus,” Medvedev tweeted, ending a three-day dispute that threatened natural gas supplies to Europe.