First Kremlin Tweet Sent from Twitter's San Francisco Headquarters

Hello everyone, I'm now on Twitter and this is my first message

​The history of Twitter is strewn with specialness -- celebrity tweets, happy birthday tweets, tweets advertising that the tweeter has just taken a nice dump -- but the company today enjoyed one of its most special days ever with the delivery of the following message: "Hello everyone, I'm now on Twitter and this is my first message." sent from @KremlinRussia.

Soviet, er, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was in the city today to send the message that his country embraces the free flow of information. So, while snipers purportedly lurked nearby, according to Tech Crunch, Medvedev typed his message.

Photo by Troy Holden /via Flickr

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Medvedev's second tweet was in praise of the city. Here's our very loose translation: "San Francisco -- very beautiful city. Today I will go to a Silicon Valley, to see Apple, Yandex, Cisco!" His second was a twitpic of the skyline. The account already has more than 2,000 followers.
According to the Moscow Times, "Washington-based Freedom House ranked Russia 175 out of 196 countries in its annual report on global press freedom this spring, and Internet usage in the country stands at about 30 percent, far below Western levels, while an even smaller fraction of people use the Internet as a source for political information."

And organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists have, during recent years, badgered Medvedev to stop barring non-party-line-toeing foreign journalists to report in the country.

In a related vein, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone told Medvedev before a gaggle of heavily frisked reporters: ""We believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive impact. We hope you'll consider us your friend."