Israeli Consulate to tweet about Gaza war

Ubiquitous microblogging service Twitter is once again making political news today with the announcement that the Consulate General of Israel in New York will hold a “Citizen’s Press Conference” today. David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs, will be taking questions about the situation in Israel and Gaza via Twitter, and anything that requires more than Twitter’s 140 SMS-friendly characters will be posted to the Israel Consulate’s blog.The conference is set to run from 1-3pm EST, but the consulate’s Twitter account, twitter.com/IsraelConsulate, is already active and responding to questions.

If you aren’t familiar with how this “tweet and reply” system works, here’s a quick primer: On Twitter, users can direct public “tweets” (basic Twitter posts that are 140 characters or less) to other users by prefixing the message with an @ symbol and a username.

For example, if you want to ask the Israel Consulate a question for today’s conference, either log in or sign up and type a message like “@IsraelConsulate Can bombs really root out Hamas?” This will allow the people running the Consulate’s account to see your question and, ideally, reply back to you with a public message that (barring any custom preferences) all other users can see.

Twitter can be used with a desktop browser, mobile applications, or even via SMS, allowing virtually anyone with some kind of an Internet-connect device to participate and as questions at this “Citizen Press Conference.”

A few drawbacks to this approach, however, could cause trouble for the Israel Consulate and Twitter’s participants. Opening the doors this wide to a global audience could very well overwhelm the Consulate’s team with question, many of which will undoubtedly be duplicates. Twitter’s focus on absolute simplicity may also make some Q&A conversations difficult to follow, as one of the most useful tools that could visualize threaded conversations, Quotably, has closed up shop; Twitter offers no comparable alternative.

Plus, Twitter offers a preference to only display replies to users that you follow, which will effectively hide any replies that @IsraelConsulate sends to most participants. Depending on the Twitter circle that you choose to follow, disabling this preference could result in a flood of @replies that drown out the Consulate’s conference.

Still, the adoption of Twitter for larger social and political exchanges will only be a boon for the service, even if this latest experiment encounters some turbulence. Other, more ambitious experiments, such as the dual-party presidential debate conducted over Twitter, may have had more trouble, but we have seen everything from C-SPAN, CNN, Shaquille O’Neill, school classrooms, Comcast, JetBlue, and even law enforcement agencies adopt the service to communicate in more personal, professional, and accessible ways with audiences.