Chavecito and the tweeter

From Cubadebate via Aporrea, a little newsy item:

Spokespersons for the Twitter social networking site, Laura Gómez and Jenna Dawn, “are delighted” that presidents, including Hugo Chávez with his @chavezcandanga, are opening accounts.

“Presidents in general, as in the case of Venezuela, generate a lot of traffic; we’re happy that President Hugo Chávez uses the platform.”

Dawn and Gómez were the two representatives of Twitter who participated in the first congress of the network in Latin America called “Hey, what are you tweeting? #140Mexico”, organized by El Universal de México. The conference played host to representatives of the Daily Newspapers Group of America.

The spokeswomen confirmed that Chávez, along with his counterparts Sebastián Piñera of Chile, Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, and Felipe Calderón, of Mexico, contacted them to verify their accounts.

In Venezuela, there were 3,839 Twitter accounts in January 2009. By December 31 of the same year, there were 225,807.

Translation mine.

And now there are way more than that. And Chavecito currently stands at how many followers?

(I love his current tweet–it’s the local equivalent to “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring!” Only it’s an old woman and she’s in a cave. I bet it’s sung to the same tune, too.)

Compare that to Piñera:

And El Narco:

Heh.

I couldn’t find one for Calderón yet. I guess he’s not tweeting after all? Better get it in gear, Felipe, there are an awful lot of parodists out there impersonating you, and some are downright rude.