Twitter, search robots get welcomes from Obama White House

President Barack Obama's stated plan to create a "Google for government" began Tuesday with a WhiteHouse.gov makeover that was announced via a blog entry on the redesigned Web site and a Twitter post.

The Web-site transition occurred at 12:01 p.m. yesterday, when Obama officially took over the presidency from predecessor George W. Bush . The Twitter announcement said "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov" and pointed online readers to the blog post written by Macon Phillips, the Obama administration's director of new media at the White House.

The @TheWhitehouse Twitter account was set up by the Bush administration, which posted more than 1,500 entries there. But the account never attracted much of a following until now. On Monday, it had only about 3,800 followers. By this evening, just a little over 24 hours since Obama's inauguration , the number of followers had topped 14,000 and was seemingly climbing with each page refresh.

Twitter is a familiar communications tool for the new administration. The Obama campaign's Twitter account still has more than 144,000 followers, the largest number for any account on the microblogging site, according to statistics posted on the Twitterholic.com Web site. That's despite the fact that only two new entries have been posted on the BarackObama page since Nov. 5.

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