The Boston Herald ran a brief commentary on the “Pros and Cons of Twitter Town Hall”:

What worked

• The format. Call it Twitterific. The ability for anyone to pelt questions at the prez in 140 characters or less amounts to a new era of civic engagement.
• Having a third party choose the questions. Let’s forever ban presidents from calling on people with their hands raised. It’s passe.
• The immediacy. Real-time questions being handed to the prez five minutes after they were written. That’s the beauty of a digital society.

What didn’t

• Obama. Or to be more specific, the lack of a moderator to reel in Obama. His answers were way too verbose and bordered on stump speeches at times.
• Lack of conservative participation. Many right-wingers felt their questions wouldn’t be answered and didn’t even try. This made things less interesting.
• Choosing well-known tweeters. Simply put, it was lame that questions from columnist Nicholas Kristof and House Speaker John Boehner crowded out the regular folks who were supposed to be front and center.

See the original post at the Herald here.