The Vatican on “Twitter”
After YouTube, with 250 million visitors in its first year, and Facebook, with some 8,400 users of the application Pope2you, the Vatican has decided to have a presence on Twitter. Several organs associated with the Holy See are involved: Vatican Radio, L’Osservatore romano and the Press Office of the Holy See.
By means of a new address on the Internet (www.resources.va) and with the creation of seven channels in different languages on Twitter, the Vatican is thus reinforcing its online presence and adopting a new technique, allowing it to publish its information rapidly.
This service is accessible, for now, in Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and Polish (addresses branching off from news_va_it). It might be available later in Chinese, Japanese or even in Arabic.
Twitter is a real-time information network driven by users throughout the world, who can intervene or react on a multitude of topics by means of brief posts—“tweets”—of up to 140 characters, through instant messaging or Short Message Service (SMS). (Sources : apic/imedia - DICI no. 216 dated June 5, 2010)
