Sound bytes and the cyber village

I signed up for Twitter on Tuesday to make sure I would be able to send a question to US President Barack Obama when he became the first head of state in the world to host a "Twitter town hall" on Wednesday.

Obama did not sit in front of his computer, as I had expected. He sat face-to-face with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in front of an audience in the East Room.

Instead of tweeting answers to the thousands of questions sent to #AskObama, he treated the "town hall" like a traditional televised interview. He expounded at length on issues ranging from education to clean energy to unemployment to the debt ceiling, ignoring Twitter's limitation on length.