Twitter Town Hall: President Obama is the first guest

I guess Lady Gaga (11.4 million followers) and Justin Bieber (10.8 million followers) are busy this week, because it’s fallen to Twitter’s third most-followed tweeter, Barack Obama (8.9m followers), to be the star of the site’s first Twitter Town Hall.

Starting from 7pm UK time, President Obama will answer questions from Twitter users. But before you go thinking that he’ll reveal the secrets of his summer holiday reading, he’s only answering questions about the American economy.

The topic has been chosen not because next year is an election year in the US, but because, according to Twitter, the issue of financial security is one of the most discussed political topics by tweeters.

Whether or not you’re interested in the US economy, Twitter has teamed up with a company called Mass Relevance, which is going to “curate, visualize and integrate conversations” for the event, which could be of interest to anyone whose ever had a hashtag for an event hijacked. The President Obama Twitter Town Hall has its own url, askobama.twitter.com, and having someone curate the event is a brilliant way of filtering out all the ‘amusing’ joke tweets from people who are not interested in taking part in the conversation, but do like to impress their followers with their wit.

The concept of Twitter Town Hall is also an intriguing development in the ongoing discussion about social media and democracies – do social networking sites make governments more accountable to the people?

Unlike a real town hall meeting, Twitter Town Hall has the advantage of being able to filter out all those questions that come from people who like the sound of their own voice a bit too much. But then again, also unlike a real town hall, Twitter Town Hall will make it possible for any difficult questions to be easily evaded (something a skilled politician can do in a real-life situation anyway).

To take part, questions must be hashtagged #AskObama. If that’s all too much to grasp, Twitter has made a little film to help out.