Twitter takes Washington by storm: A website, tweetcongress.org, keeps track of the representatives and senators who have taken to sending out the messages of 140 characters or less and ranks them in terms of their number of followers and messages sent.Senator John McCain of Arizona has the most followers by far -- more than 106,000 -- cashing in on his name recognition as the Republican presidential nominee rather than his Twitter proficiency.
The 72-year-old McCain is an infrequent Twitterer and acknowledges getting a little assistance. "YEs!! I am twittering on my blackberry but not without a little help!" read one recent message. [...]
For Mark McKinnon, a one-time media adviser to former president George W. Bush and Senator McCain, the discovery of Twitter by Congress is a sign it may no longer be cutting edge.
"If members of Congress are Twittering, we can be fairly certain it won?t be hip much longer," he wrote in a blog post on The Daily Beast website.
