President Obama received nearly 170,000 questions via Twitter during his first Twitter Town Hall at the White House today.

Only a fraction of these could be answered during the webcast session, which lasted an hour and ten minutes. Obama’s verbal responses were generally very much longer than the maximum of 140 characters for the written questions. At one point, Obama apologized for his long answers but made no serious attempt to stay under Twitter’s maximum limit.

The Town Hall was similar to previous discussions with social media, which Facebook and YouTube hosted. We will surely see many more events with social media during this increasingly intense election campaign.

Here is a good summary in Washington Post’s online edition of today’s Town Hall. It contained no direct news but gave a good insight into how the President looks at the past two and a half years in the White House and what he believes is now necessary to create new jobs and solve the country’s economic crisis.