Hugo Chavez becomes a major twit

AFTER CALLING the social notworking website Twitter a tool of terror, America's favourite foreign president Hugo Chavez has swamped the site with his views of the world.

The President of Venezuela has rapidly risen up the rankings to become the top tweeter in his country. He is not on his mobile himself all the time of course. Instead, he has hired 200 people to "be him".

Chavez, who according to his twitter bio is the Presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela. Soldado Bolivariano, Socialista y Antiimperialista", has 239,994 Twitter followers and is linked to 7,538 lists.

Chavez follows just five others, so it is clear that he just wants to make pronouncements. Only a third of the population of Venezuela have any form of Internet access.

Apparently more than 50,000 messages have been reported in the two weeks since he's been tweeting. He told the Associated Press the team was needed due to the avalanche of requests, and some grievances.

He now calls the service "a weapon that also needs to be used by the revolution", which makes a change from when he called it a tool of terror.

Chavez is the first leader of a sizeable country to make extensive use of social networking to communicate with its people over the Internet while in office. µ