Introducing White House 2.0 for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s tech-savvy administration has taken another leap into cyberspace with the roll-out of ‘White House 2.0.’ linking it to social networks MySpace and Facebook and hot micro-blogging service Twitter. ‘Today the White House is taking steps to expand how the administration is communicating with the public,’ the White House blog said Friday announcing the additions to the recently launched official Flickr photostream.

‘Technology has profoundly impacted how - and where - we all consume information and communicate with one another. WhiteHouse.gov is an important part of the Administration’s effort to use the internet to reach the public quickly and effectively - but it isn’t the only place.’

The blog post contains links to the White House’s pages on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and iTunes.

‘The WhiteHouse blog will power a lot of the content in these networks,’ the blog post explains, ‘but we’re looking forward to hearing from our fans, friends and followers.’

During the White House race, Obama’s campaign pioneered extensive use of social networking technologies that helped power him into the Oval Office.

Content from Obama’s website WhiteHouse.gov is being fed in real time to White House profile pages on MySpace and Facebook and members of the communities can sign up as Facebook ‘fans’ or MySpace ‘friends.’

The White House had more than 31,000 fans on Facebook and more than 4,000 friends on MySpace within a few hours of the pages going online while more than 8,500 people had signed up as ‘followers’ of the White House on Twitter.

The blog post referred to an Obama speech from a week earlier in which he said the government needs to ‘recognize that we cannot meet the challenges of today with old habits and stale thinking.’

Besides revamping WhiteHouse.gov, the Obama administration has created several other websites including recovery.gov to track the economic stimulus bill and transparency.gov to monitor spending.