Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Stephanopoulos Interviews McCain on Twitter

So I guess this is one of those experiments in journalism. George Stephanopoulos is conducting an interview with John McCain, on twitter. The problem is, there's no threading. You can see one's statements or the other but not interleaved.

When McCain writes, "@GStephanopoulos i haven't seen it but i would explore every option. i repeat, we wouldn't have this problem if we hadn't bailed them out" I don't know what "it" he's referring to.

There is a service Tweader that tries to solve just this problem by showing conversations. You enter the Twitter ID of a post and it follows the "in reply to" links. The problem is, Stephanopoulos' posts don't have these links.

With a few technical details fixed (and these really should have been taken care of beforehand), this might be interesting. But do we really need to reduce interview questions and answers down to 140 characters? Were soundbites too long?

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