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Saturday, May 2, 2009

White House joins Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

The official White House Blog calls it "WhiteHouse 2.0." The administration is unveiling its membership in a trio of the social-networking leaders today: Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. How do the accounts look shortly after launch?

The Facebook page already has more than 38,000 fans, and the number appears to jump another thousand every few minutes at this hour. The MySpace page is a highly stylized version of designs typically seen on the service, with 5,300 friends and counting. "A quick glance at the profiles shows that they mostly just link to or copy entries on the existing WhiteHouse.gov blog, but they welcome comments and are quickly gathering thousands of fans," PaidContent.org says.

TechCrunch offers initial analysis of the MySpace page: "There are no ads on the page, but if you click through to photos page, then you do get some ads. The add beside this photo of the president running down a hallway with his daughter's puppy has an ad that says, 'Pimp My Profile.' Not very Presidential. On Facebook, there is an ad slot on the actual page, but I only saw a house ad for Facebook's gift shop with a penguin. ... The Facebook page basically has the same information, but presented as a stream. Which one do you like better?"

The @whitehouse Twitter feed so far has more than 10,000 followers and retweeted a swine-flu alert from the CDC. Information about the H1N1 virus is the most common theme across the White House's uses of the services today.

"Hopefully, these pages will follow the same pattern as the administration's other web efforts -- they start out underwhelming, but improve eventually

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