Two Republican presidential candidates — Rick Santorum and Buddy Roemer — tweeted responses in real time throughout the president’s speech.

Both were incredulous about Obama’s various claims and promises, making ample use of exclamation marks. They also both painstakingly posted the #SOTU hashtag alongside each tweet.

The President said “he will defend the diginity of every human being” – Mr President that must include the unborn #SOTU

— Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) January 25, 2012

Did Obama just say “money in politics?” Be still my beating heart. Let’s hope he says my 3 favorite words: Campaign Finance Reform! #SOTU

— Gov. Buddy Roemer (@BuddyRoemer) January 25, 2012

(We heard Newt Gingrich had also considered live-tweeting, but apparently he was busy with other things in Florida.)

While Santorum and Roemer got feisty, Obama’s official Twitter account studiously posted sound bites from the official speech.

Twitter said the most popular moment with tweeters overall was Obama’s corny joke about spilled milk, in a section about legislation reform. Whether people loved it or hated it, they tweeted about it, at a rate of 14,131 tweets per minute.

Overall, Twitter counted 766,681 tweets about the State of the Union.

Did you catch any members of Congress looking down at their phones? In all, congresspeople (with the help of their staffs) accounted for 548 tweets during the time of the speech, Twitter said.

But by far the most entertaining SOTU live-tweeter was New England Patriots wide receiver Chad Ochocinco, who stayed up late, despite tonight’s proximity to the Super Bowl, in order to take in Obama’s remarks.

Ochocinco noted the lack of smiling from “the guy over Obama’s left shoulder.” When a follower identified “the guy” as House Speaker John Boehner, Ochocinco looked up Boehner’s Twitter handle, and analyzed his tweet history as “pretty angry.”

Ochocinco’s followers jokingly turned it into a drinking game, at one point counting a Boehner nose-scratch as “close enough” to a smile.

After Ochocinco complained about the long applause breaks, and inquired about Obama’s impressive ability to memorize (followers informed him Obama was using a teleprompter), a follower chided the football player for sounding like he was “experiencing politics” for the first time.

Ochocinco took it in stride, responding that it was “like losing [his] virginity all over again.”

Like losing virginity all over again RT @dylgoss7: Hahah i feel like this is @ochocinco ‘s first time experiencing politics.

— Chad Ochocinco (@ochocinco) January 25, 2012

(Graph image credit: Twitter)

Quora set up a special page to live-stream video of Obama’s address at 6 pm PT on Tuesday. It’s asking users to submit and follow questions about economic and domestic policies.

Quora exec Marc Bodnick told users they must submit questions by Wednesday at 5 pm PT. He said an unspecified number of questions will be answered by the White House “in the coming days.”

Barack Obama has made a practice of engaging with Web communities on YouTube/Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Quora is a relatively small site to get such attention; it has less than half a million monthly U.S. visitors according to public measures like Compete and Quantcast.

Founded by early Facebook employees, Quora started as a Q&A service, but recently has branched into Web curation.

U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra had previously used Quora to ask users questions about open government and emerging technologies.

The company has confirmed to All Things D that it is actively investigating several opportunities, and is in talks with several partners about gambling on the Internet.

A Zynga spokesperson provided this statement to AllThingsD:

“We build games and experiences that our players want and love. Zynga Poker is the world’s largest online poker game with more than 7 million people playing every day and over 30 million each month. We know from listening to our players that there’s an interest in the real money gambling market. We’re in active conversations with potential partners to better understand and explore this new opportunity.”

As with any new entrant in the space, Zynga will have to fulfill several requirements, meaning any major rollout is still months away.

The San Francisco-based social games maker will have to wade through a maze of state, national and international regulations. It will have to secure the correct licenses, and it also needs the right technology to make betting over the Internet secure.

For either of these last two requirements, a partnership or acquisition of an online gambling organization or other technology would make the most sense, instead of starting from scratch.

However, the effort could easily pay off.

Zynga was one of the first online gaming companies on Facebook, and continues to dominate the platform today. If it is able to get its toe in the door, just as the laws change in the U.S., it could be a leader yet again.

Back in October, Zynga first started showing broad interest in the casino category.

Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus announced at a press event that the company was going to launch Zynga Casino, which would serve as a single destination on Facebook to build off its strong brand in poker.

Its first new game, which has not launched yet, will be bingo.

Until now, the company’s efforts have been limited to building social and mobile games that are given away for free and monetized through the sale of virtual goods.

Getting users to make bets and part with real money could prove difficult, even for a company that has so many dedicated fans.

One thing Zynga has going for it is that social games are frequently compared to gambling because of their addictive nature — both lure consumers into spending a few more dollars to continue playing.

The casino genre has also been quietly racking up big numbers on Facebook.

Besides Zynga Poker, which is the most popular poker game on Facebook, and one of the company’s longest standing titles, there are many other sleeping giants. Sean Ryan, Facebook’s director of game partnerships, has even called them “unbelievable monsters.”

Said Ryan: “It turns out that people are completely okay winning virtual currency that they can never cash out.”

If players actually have the chance to win money, who knows the size of the opportunity?

A Facebook spokesperson said the company does not necessarily see a future for gambling on the social network. “We don’t have any plans to get into real-money gambling,” she said.

It’s unclear if that eliminates others from experimenting. In the meantime, it hasn’t stopped game makers from exploring the category or the concept.

Last week, Seattle-based Double Down Interactive, which was named by Facebook as one of the most popular game makers of 2011, was acquired by video poker giant International Game Technology for $500 million. It has 4.7 million monthly active users playing a variety of games, including blackjack, slots, video poker and roulette.

The deal closely followed Caesars Entertainment’s purchase of Playtika, an Israeli game company known for its Facebook title Slotomania. Caesars bought the company in two stages, the first of which was rumored to be purchased for up to $90 million.

Caesars, which filed to go public in November, declined to comment because it is currently in its quiet period.

However, some of its plans were revealed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. It said its Caesars and World Series of Poker brands are dedicated to online gaming, and will take advantage of real-money gaming as it becomes legalized. Right now, Caesars Entertainment offers games “for fun” in jurisdictions where online gambling is not yet legal, but has identified the legalization of online poker in the U.S. as “the largest opportunity in online gaming in the near term.”

Still, the biggest hurdle is the law.

Internationally, several countries have permitted gambling for some time, and those areas represent the most immediate opportunities.

But there are signs of the U.S. beginning to open up, too. On the day before Christmas, the Department of Justice gave the online gambling community an early present, according to a blog post written by Nelson Rose, a professor and lawyer.

“President Barack Obama’s administration has just declared, perhaps unintentionally, that almost every form of intra-state Internet gambling is legal under federal law, and so may be games played interstate and even internationally,” Rose wrote.

Essentially, what the Justice Department did was to issue a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing bets on sporting events — not all events and contests, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

With that clarification in place, it will now be up to every state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures. So far, Nevada and the District of Columbia have moved quickly to enact laws. To get other state laws passed could be a lengthy process, especially during an election year.

In the meantime, launching games only in Nevada and D.C. doesn’t represent the big opportunity everyone was hoping for.

To be competitive against Caesars and IGT, Zynga may have to partner or acquire companies that already have the licenses in place or the necessary expertise.

Some of the more obvious candidates include Bwin, which operates PartyGaming.com and is traded on the London Stock Exchange; Betfair, and other operators, like Bodog, Bet365 and 888.com. Many are based in the U.K. and handle a variety of casino games and sporting contests there.

The entrance into a new market, such as gambling, would take substantial resources, and Zynga has them thanks to its public offering. In December, it raised $1 billion, making it the largest Internet IPO since Google.

So, will Zynga be the next “unbelievable monster?” Clearly, it is willing to try.

Being a cloud evangelist on the President’s cabinet appears to have made Vivek Kundra an attractive prospect for the private sector. Salesforce.com has just announced that it has hired him as its EVP of emerging markets.

When we last saw Kundra, he had stepped down from his position as Chief Information Officer of the United States, to which he was appointed by President Barack Obama. Having proposed between $5 billion and $20 billion in savings from the federal information technology budget — which, at $80 billion annually, is the biggest IT budget on the planet — he left government in June for a teaching stint at Harvard University.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised Kundra in a statement: “Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing … His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise.”

And, naturally, Kundra had nice things to say about Salesforce: “Salesforce.com is an industry disruptor, helping organizations use the transformative power of technology for change … I am excited to join the most innovative company in the world that is pioneering social, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the enterprise.”

The statement is a little short on what Kundra’s job will actually entail. And emerging markets, at least geographically, aren’t exactly Salesforce’s strength.

For the year ended last Jan. 31, Salesforce reported sales of $1.7 billion, of which nearly $1.2 billion, or almost 70 percent, was derived from customers in the Americas; Europe and Asia accounted for 17 percent and 13 percent of sales, respectively. So, perhaps his brief will be to boost those numbers a bit.

Consider this: The Republican winner of the Iowa Caucus race won by only eight votes. Mitt Romney received 24.55 percent of the total, while former Senator Rick Santorum took home 24.54 percent — a very narrow victory.

In the New Hampshire primary last week, Mitt Romney also won, this time by a larger margin.

But on Zazzle, where customers get to design customized products and sell them on its marketplace, U.S. voters are voting with their pocketbooks.

For example, interest in Rick Santorum exploded in January. The number of people searching for his apparel and other merchandise is already five times greater than it was during the entire month of December.

Some of his popular apparel includes a “Rick Santorum has a raging clue,” T-shirt, and the more straightforward “Rick Santorum 2012″ coffee mug.

Meanwhile, searches for Mitt Romney’s products are only three times higher over the same time period. A popular button for Romney declares. “Mitt is Legit.”

President Barack Obama has a little more diversity of products on offer, probably because he’s been in the spotlight for longer. There’s the regular assortment of T-shirts and pins, of course, and also mouse pads, iPhone covers, skateboard art and ties.

Not all of the gear is always positive; some items might reflect how much someone dislikes a candidate.

Every year, the Iowa caucus is used to gauge which candidates U.S. voters prefer at the time, even if the outcome does not result in the selection of a national delegate.

Similarly, Redwood City, Calif.-based Zazzle believes it has a big enough forum to conduct a meaningful poll of its own. Tomorrow, the company will kick off a poll that will analyze design and purchasing behavior up until the day before Super Tuesday, which falls on March 6 this election year.

In the past, Zazzle has often been used by Americans to cast their vote. On the site, more than 2.5 million custom political designs, and one million political clothing items have been sold to date.

“Whereas Twitter and Facebook reflect consumer opinions through text, sites like Zazzle are where the physical manifestation of ideas and opinions take place. This has been an accurate form of pre-determining political stories since the 2008 election,” said Josh Neuman, Zazzle’s head of political merchandising and analyses, in a statement.

For instance, the year before Barack Obama took office in 2008, 21,099 items Obama-related items were created on Zazzle, 73 percent percent of which were positive.

The final poll won’t be unveiled until March, but in the meantime, here are some other recent trends Zazzle has witnessed:

• Interest in Santorum has exploded. The number of people searching for Santorum merchandise in January is already five times greater than during the whole month of December.
• Romney is seeing three times as much traffic.
• In January, there’s been a dramatic surge in merchandise sales for Ron Paul, who currently outsells Obama by nearly three times.
• Obama merchandise continues to be a top seller, but 60 percent of the items are anti-Obama themed.
• People are still buying merchandise for dropped-out candidates, including Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. The sales for either of these candidates are higher than those for Gary Johnson, who is still in the race.

Today it became clear that SOPA, at least in its current form, will never get that far. Word came from the White House today that the administration, while sympathetic to the cause of curbing online piracy, will support neither the SOPA bill nor its companion bill — known as PIPA — in the Senate.

Responding to a petition, the White House announced in a blog post today that Obama will not “support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Basically, what it comes down to is this: Piracy is bad, but approaches like SOPA are bad solutions that would potentially hurt the free-flowing, vibrant Internet we’ve all come to rely on for so many things. As the statement reads: “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

That aligns pretty closely with a statement that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made in a recent speech in The Hague, in which she said that governments must fight the theft of intellectual property, “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

On top of that, some of the technical proposals in the bill — meant to remedy the piracy problem — go too far in tinkering, and might perhaps mess up the basic plumbing of the Internet itself. Doing so would probably create unforseen Internet security problems, the White House argues.

Any bill that does aim to clamp down on piracy should be “narrowly targeted,” and cover only “activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws.” That’s also a pretty clear statement that the Administration sees SOPA, as currently written, to be vastly over-broad in its legislative intent.

Additionally, there are also reports that Eric Cantor — the Virginia Republican who everyone knows is the real power broker in the House of Representatives — says the SOPA bill won’t come to the House floor for a vote anytime soon, unless there are some significant changes to it.

Somehow, I find it encouraging that opposing SOPA — or at least calling for changes to it — was the issue on which Obama and Cantor, who can’t seem to agree on anything, found they had some room for common ground. Could this signify a badly needed thaw in bipartisan relations in Washington?

The top four most powerful people are politicians, including Barack Obama in the top spot. At No. 5 is Bill Gates, who ranks high for his philanthropic role as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Some of the other tech leaders and their rankings:

5. Bill Gates, co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

9. Mark Zuckerberg, founder, Facebook.

30. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders, Google.

40. Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.

42. Robin Li, CEO, Baidu.

44. Li Ka-shing, chairman, Hutchinson Wampoa.

58. Tim Cook, CEO, Apple.

60. Masayoshi Son, CEO, Softbank.

Today it was Fujitsu’s turn. The Japanese computing giant teamed up with RIKEN, the quasi-public Japanese research institution, to announce that they had built a machine they call the K Computer, which can perform 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

And while all that may sound very impressive, it’s not quite as muscular as the Titan machine being assembled in the U.S. at the Oak Ridge National Labs, which can — or will — perform 20 petaflops.

The machine (pictured) is made up of 864 racks with 88,128 interconnected CPU chips, all of them based on the SPARC architecture for which Sun Microsystems, and therefore Oracle, are best known, though Fujitsu has long been a SPARC licensee. The new K Computer is basically an improvement and extension to the same K computer that took the top spot on the last Top 500 list in June, supplanting in the process a Chinese machine that had taken the crown last November.

Never mind that it contained all U.S.-made chips, the Chinese feat caused the leader of the free world to kvetch about the apparent sorry state of U.S. supercomputing, thus prompting, perhaps indirectly, the Titan machine at Oak Ridge.

It’s not as though China hasn’t been heard from on the supercomputing front recently. Last week its Sunway BlueLight MPP raised eyebrows not for its performance — a relatively pokey 795 teraflops — but rather for the fact that it’s built using all Chinese-made components.

So what will it be used for? Weather simulations, research into drugs and solar cells, and simulating earthquakes and tsunamis.

Here are the more formal descriptions from the announcement:

–Analyzing the behavior of nanomaterials through simulations and contributing to the early development of such next-generation semiconductor materials, particularly nanowires and carbon nanotubes, that are expected to lead to future fast-response, low-power devices.

–Predicting which compounds, from among a massive number of drug candidate molecules, will prevent illnesses by binding with active regions on the proteins that cause illnesses, as a way to reduce drug development times and costs (pharmaceutical applications).

–Simulating the actions of atoms and electrons in dye-sensitized solar cells to contribute to the development of solar cells with higher energy-conversion efficiency.

–Simulating seismic wave propagation, strong motion, and tsunamis to predict the effects they will have on human-made structures; predicting the extent of earthquake-impact zones for disaster prevention purposes; and contributing to the design of quake-resistant structures.

–Conducting high-resolution (400-m) simulations of atmospheric circulation models to provide detailed predictions of weather phenomena that elucidate localized effects, such as cloudbursts.

So what’s a petaflop anyway? A FLOP is a floating point operation. Its a type of mathematical function that involves decimal points. Adding 5.6 and 11.21 is a floating point operation and is therefore slightly more complicated from a computing standpoint than adding 11 and 5. But in computing, even day-to-day computing, it’s massively more complicated than all that.

A top-of-the-line NVidia GeForce GTX 590 graphics card, which specializes in floating point operations, can run about 2,400 gigaflops. Since a gigaflop is a billion flops, I guess that technically puts the GeForce GTX 590 into the teraflop, or trillion-flop range.

Petaflops are then in the quadrillion-flop territory, which as I noted before makes them fun because they’re among those rare numbers that are larger than the U.S. national debt. So 10.51 quadrillion flops gets written like so: 10,510,000,000,000,000. Didn’t I say this was fun?

All this is leading up to a big supercomputing conference starting in 10 days in Seattle. So expect lots more supercomputing news in the coming days!

Obama’s Tumblr launched today with a couple of casual posts that are clearly not written by the president himself. An anonymous staffer writes that the Obama reelection campaign plans to use Tumblr as “a huge collaborative storytelling effort.” That will be done using Tumblr’s popular reblogging feature to pull in content from other Tumblrs, as well as direct user submissions.

The best part is a meek plea for decency, so rarely found in political discussions online.

There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people — fairly nice ones — and that your mother would want you to be polite.

The time for putting party first is over. If you want to see a bipartisan #compromise, let Congress know. Call. Email. Tweet. —BO

July 29, 2011 7:45 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BarackObama

Barack Obama

“The time for putting party first is over. If you want to see a bipartisan #compromise, let Congress know. Call. Email. Tweet. —BO,” the president wrote. Then his team proceeded to tweet out state-by-state in alphabetical order the Twitter handles of Republican representatives (they’re currently on “i.”)

Earlier this week, Obama urged Americans to contact their reps during a prime-time address. They did en masse, taking down or making unreliable the Web sites of Speaker of the House John Boehner and others. (My colleague Arik Hesseldahl wrote a killer headline for that one: “Obama: I Want YOU to Crash John Boehner’s Web Server.”)

If nothing else, Obama’s tweets will likely bump up the follower accounts of a good many representatives’ Twitter accounts. It’s a #FollowFriday in true Twitter fashion.

See also: Harry Reid’s Plan to Save America From Default Using Wireless Spectrum

Reid’s plan, which is expected to come to the Senate floor for a vote today, would raise $24.5 billion over 10 years, of which $13.1 billion would be available for deficit reduction, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

So how does $13 billion help solve a $14.3 trillion problem? It helps fills some of the gaps by making the bill more palatable to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. As one wireless industry lobbyist put it, spectrum auctions are in large part seen as politically neutral territory because they’re not tax increases that Republicans would oppose, and they’re not spending cuts, which so irritate Democrats.

The Reid plan is a variation of one put forth by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Commerce Committee which oversees wireless spectrum issues. Rockefeller’s plan would have raised $6.5 billion. Both plans essentially call for setting aside a big block of wireless spectrum, known as the D Block, for public safety. It would give the FCC authority to auction off TV spectrum currently held by TV broadcasters, and pay for financial incentives to entice them to voluntarily give that spectrum up. Broadcasters are generally not inclined to give it up, however.

There’s also a spending component to the plan. The D Block spectrum set aside for public safety agencies would be used to create a national wireless broadband network that emergency officials could use during an emergency. This is an idea that’s been rolling around Washington since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Rockefeller’s plan calls for $12 billion to begin construction of the network, plus a few billion for research and development into additional uses for the network. Reid’s bill drops the R&D funding and cuts the construction funds to $7 billion. It’s not enough to build the network, but more of a down payment, meaning there’s a good chance that lawmakers will have to find some money to finish the job in a few years.

Reid’s bill would also direct the Federal Communications Commission auction of airwaves — currently held by government agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense — that aren’t being actively used. In addition, it would encourage TV broadcasters to voluntarily give up some of their unused spectrum for auction by offering them part of the proceeds.

What would all that spectrum be used for? The expectation is that wireless carriers like Verizon Wireless and AT&T would bid on it in order to expand their wireless broadband networks, and thus give smartphone users more bandwidth to slake their apparently insatiable digital thirst.

Just because spectrum auction revenue is neither a tax increase nor a spending cut doesn’t mean there’s no opposition. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, blasted the plan and called it a “cop-out” from the Senate floor. Meanwhile, Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, told Politico earlier this week that the debt bill is the wrong place to debate wireless spectrum.

It wouldn’t be the first time that wireless spectrum has figured in the budget-balancing and deficit-reduction process. Revenue generated from spectrum auctions helped then-President Bill Clinton balance the budget in 1993 and 1997, and President George W. Bush used them to help reduce the federal budget deficit in 2005.

(Image from Harry Reid’s campaign site.)

The stylin’ Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and executive chairman, acted as the voice of the people, channeling their “#askobama” questions to the president and offering stats and visualizations of where they were coming from and how they reflected the topics Twitter users were most interested in asking about.

Though these town hall meetings are never terrifically interactive or spontaneous, Dorsey and the Twitter team did their best to make the event feel like it was coming together in real time by using a combination of regional curators and algorithms to choose relevant and popular questions. Dorsey noted more than once that a particular question had been tweeted only a few minutes before he asked it.

After the event, Twitter partner Mass Relevance reported that it had recorded 169,395 total tweets tagged #askobama, with the most questions related to jobs (18,957), the budget (15,000) and taxes (14,777) — which makes sense, since the stated topic of discussion was jobs and the economy.

The organizing group also did a nice job of facilitating the discussion live on Twitter by retweeting the chosen questions and tweeting Obama’s answers. Plus, the event featured Obama typing and posting his very first tweet, which was riveting (not really): “in order to reduce the deficit,what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep – bo.”

The early morning tweets, posted on the “Fox News Politics” Twitter feed, claimed that President Obama had been assassinated while campaigning in a restaurant in Iowa. The hackers, who are thought to be part of a group called “the Script Kiddies,” changed the account’s password, preventing Fox from correcting the errant messages for hours, a person familiar with the matter said.

The tweets were eventually removed and replaced with a statement from the news channel saying that hackers posted the false messages and that it is working with Twitter to determine how the hack happened. The Twitter feed has roughly 37,500 followers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Today Obama for America, U.S. President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, announced it had taken over control of his Twitter and Facebook accounts from the White House. As part of the move, Obama himself will “regularly” contribute updates himself, designated by the signature “-BO.”

Despite the hurrah around the first tweeting president (Obama joined in April 2007), Obama admitted in 2009 that aides were responsible for composing his tweets.

“Let me say that I have never used Twitter,” he told students in Shanghai. “I noticed that young people are very busy with these electronics. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.”

The 2012 Obama campaign said today it will try to use social media sites as interactive tools rather than just straight announcements and daily reports.

Obama has 8.7 million Twitter followers and 21.7 million Facebook fans.

Kundra carried a bit of a reputation as a wunderkind. Born in New Delhi, reared in Tanzania before moving to the Washington, D.C., area, and fluent in Swahili, Hindi and English, he hit perfectly the ideal of the bright young minds marching into Washington after the 2008 election, seeking to cast out the crusty defenders of the seemingly incurable institutional inertia for which the nation’s capital is infamous and leave in its place a government whose parts looked shiny and new.

A big problem with the federal government, he said in the final days of the Bush-to-Obama transition, was that “process had trumped outcome.” Complying with the rules made it near impossible to spur innovation within the halls of government. His brief as he assumed office in early 2009 was to change that.

Today he announced plans to step down and take a position at Harvard University, where he will be a joint fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. (See Harvard’s statement here.) So what was the overall effect of his two years and change in office?

As the CTO of the government of the District of Columbia, he famously adopted Google Apps and did away with Microsoft Office as that body’s standard office suite for its 38,000 employees. A similar effort to bring Google Apps to federal agencies quickly got messy as it devolved into a squabble between Microsoft and Google.

On other fronts, Kundra sought to inject the kind of common sense to which official Washington has often been resistant. He loosened rules on government-issued wireless phones because federal employees hated the devices they were being given, approving iPhones and BlackBerrys and even the occasional iPad for use at federal agencies, provided they could be made secure.

Ostensibly in charge of some $80 billion in information technology spending — arguably the largest IT budget in the world — he aimed to make agencies more accountable for their spending. He launched an IT spending dashboard intended to allow people to see for themselves how money was being spent. The result was about what you’d expect: Many federal IT projects were over budget, behind schedule, not delivering the needed result or some combination of all three. He ordered some cut back, others killed.

Openness and transparency, constant bywords of the early Obama presidency, were made real by Data.gov, paymentaccuracy.gov and USASpending.gov. Citizens could, in theory, look in on the spending of their tax dollars with no more effort than that required for a Google search. In coming weeks, these and other sites like them will either freeze or go dark entirely, having lost their funding. Some of these included sites in Kundra’s portfolio.

A convert to the new religion of cloud computing, he announced last month plans to move 78 different government programs that today account for $20 billion in spending to cloud-based services in order to save $5 billion a year. He talked about the plan at length with AllThingsD on May 25.

The amount of savings at first seems impressive but it really isn’t. A $5 billion reduction in spending considered in the context of the $3.8 trillion budget amounts to less than one fifth of 1 percent of federal outlays. What’s not clear is whether the cloudward shift in government he has proposed yields a wider return on investment beyond mere financial savings.

The fundamental mission of IT is to enable people to get more work done faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost than before. Will federal workers become faster, more productive and more effectual if and when Kundra’s cloud is fully operational? Will government, as a result, become even slightly more responsive to the people in whose name it exists? Time will tell, but we can only hope. Making sure that happens will be the task of the next CIO of the United States — that is, if there is to be one at all.

Athar, a Pakistani IT consultant who tweets under the handle “ReallyVirtual,” has been living in the vacation town of Abbottabad, where bin Laden was found and killed in a mansion.

“Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event),” was his first tweet on the matter, followed by “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/.”

Then, “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S.”

“@m0hcin the few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani…”

“Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicopters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad.”

Athar also helpfully tweeted a link to where the supposed helicopter crash occurred (shown at left), and a picture of downtown Abbottabad on the day of May 2 after everything calmed down (see at right).

But Athar didn’t welcome the burst of fame brought when his tweeting was discovered in the hours after Obama’s address. As he put it, “I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into facebook. That’s all.”

The White House’s official version of events, which explain the “helicopter crash” described by Athar was a helicopter used in the raid that was destroyed after it had a mechanical failure, can be found here.

According to officials, bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound was discovered in part because it was valued at approximately $1 million but had no Internet or phone service.

You can read the (fictional) user-generated reviews of it on Google Maps here (the page has now been taken down, but a screenshot is below).

This tweet may have been the first public (credible but unverified) word of Osama bin Laden’s death, from Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

December 31, 1969 4:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

Twitter’s role in getting the news out was quickly praised by (of course) tweeters.

December 31, 1969 4:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

News organizations were told that an Obama address was coming, and then began reporting on bin Laden’s death citing anonymous sources.

December 31, 1969 4:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

While Obama’s speech focused on the core event and the significance of the occasion, more details began to emerge and spread.

December 31, 1969 4:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

The jokes came quickly (calling for a “long-form death certificate” seemed to be the first reaction of far too many people):

December 31, 1969 4:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

December 31, 1969 4:00 pm viaReplyRetweetFavorite

@

There were also many, many tweets about gratefulness for the military’s work, remembrance of the 9/11 attacks, and differing views on whether bin Laden’s death was a cause for celebration or grimness.

Update: Twitter said it recorded 4,000 tweets per second at the beginning and end of Obama’s speech. (The record is close to 7,000 at the stroke of New Year’s Day in Japan this year.)

You can also see the quick-updating stream of Facebook status messages mentioning Osama bin Laden here.

Though Obama is out stumping for his reelection campaign, the folks at Facebook will surely ask questions about tech policy and usage of social media. And what we really want to know: has the president visited the fan page for Mark Zuckerberg’s adorable puppy dog yet?

1:43 pm: In addition to strapping young Facebook staffers (who are the ones you’ll see in the camera shots) the White House invited a bevy of Silicon Valley folks–the CEOs of start-ups like Meebo, Yelp and Justin.tv plus regulars like Ron Conway and MC Hammer–as well as local politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom.

Under-over on what percent of the articles about this event will mention what Mark Zuckerberg is wearing?

(It’s a suit jacket, tie and sneakers.)

1:55 pm: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg takes the stage, says Facebook has worked with the White House on education, jobs, technology and anti-bullying efforts. Obama has 19 million likes on Facebook, she says.

Sheryl makes a funny: “Even though it’s Facebook, no poking the president.”

Zuckerberg comes in, says lots of people use Facebook to share…pauses. “I’m kind of nervous. We have the President of the United States here.”

Obama enters to much applause. He is also wearing a tie.

Oho! Obama went for it: “My name is Barack Obama and I’m the guy who got Mark to wear a jacket and tie.”

They both take their jackets off. (Thrilling live coverage, huh?)

Obama says he’s here because more and more young people are getting and processing their information through different media and connecting with each other. A good democracy has informed citizens, and Facebook allows us to make sure this isn’t just a one-way conversation.

2:04 pm: Zuckerberg says his first question is about debt. What do you think we can specifically cut in order to make this all happen?

Obama gives a very long answer. He says he has to pay for a lot of things (wars, healthcare, recessions), but his plan is to cut about two trillion dollars as a reduction in spending (“government waste”), another $400 billion reduction in Pentagon spending, and make tax reforms: “people like me and frankly, you, Mark, paying a little more tax.” But healthcare still has to be reformed further to keep down costs, he says, and we need to invest in research in energy and technology alternatives.

Next question is about home buying. Obama says he has a lot of sympathy for people. Then a Facebook employee from Detroit asks about jobs. Obama says his recovery act is working, the economy is growing, and his debt and deficit plan can keep that growth even while cutting spending. The only part of the answer that gets applause is a line about fuel efficiency standards.

Next question, taken from the live stream, is about the Dream Act and immigration. Obama winds through the issue–”What’s undeniable is America is a nation of immigrants”–then gets to the part this audience cares about: techies who can’t get permission to live and work in the U.S.. He calls these people “job generators” like Andy Grove of Intel, and says he wants the laws to be changed.

2:36 pm: Zuckerberg is not doing much moderation or conversing with the president. At most he is reading prompts. It might as well be anyone up there.

I spoke too soon. As part of a question about education, Zuckerberg compliments Obama on his work on Race to the Top.

As part of his eduction answer, Obama says government alone can’t fix education. He says he’s inspired and frustrated by how many smart people are in Silicon Valley, but he always hears stories about how they can’t find engineers and computer programmers, which is a failure of education. Lifting up technology and math and science is hopefully one of the most important legacies I can have as president of the United States, Obama says.

More talk of healthcare. Obama plugs incentives to improve healthcare IT, and incentives for performance to reform health reimbursement policies.

Last question is about Obama’s regrets from his term so far. On healthcare, he says “It was so complicated that at some point people started saying, oh this is typical Washington vapor. I’ve asked myself sometimes if there was a way we could have gotten this done more quickly.” He switches to more positive topics: what he feels he must get done while he is president. That is: balance the budget, reform immigration, fix energy.

Nobody is doing better than these oil companies, Obama says. (Well, maybe Facebook is doing a little better, he kids.)

He urges audience to not get frustrated and remember that the U.S. still has a lot going for it.

Well, it turns out that the town hall had very little to do with Facebook, more like using the company as a proxy for young people.

Zuckerberg offers Obama a Facebook hoody as a token of appreciation.

It might have been simpler for Obama just to ask Facebook to give his campaign some pre-IPO shares.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.