So, politicians are letting their followers know what they're up to with tweets, just like pop stars, in 140 characters or less. The Party School of the Beijing Committee of the Communist Party of China is training its officials on how to use micro blogs; and the State Council Information Office has rolled out an app for the iPad.

The news last week proves social networking in China has moved out of beta and into the main arena. And while tech fans and politics majors froth with euphoria, the rest of us can sit back and enjoy the fun. Just imagine the sort of tweets we can look forward to:

Today, 10:22, @daweibo: "Totally cool meeting at Joint Sessions today. Chou was a laff a minute, props to the Party. Love the tune Ode to the Motherland, makes the hairs on my neck stand up every time."

Retweeted 1.2 billion times; Comments 888,888.

Today, 11:15, @xiaorandi: "You know I'm big fan of ur new look @daweibo and I gotta say that red ties definitely suit u more than blue, since u asked. Btw ur speech was awesome!"

Retweeted 0 times; Comments 0.

Optimists believe micro blogs in the corridors of power could usher in a new era of opening up and reform when it comes to information, as our country's leaders reveal, in real-time their innermost thoughts and feelings.

These glass half-full netizens expect the officials who become part of our social networks to be not just more accessible, but more accountable. Got a problem with noisy neighbors? Just tweet your local Party chairman. Go straight to the top.

My glass is empty, which means I'm a bit of cynic. My bet is that if you get an answer at all, you will be asked to take your complaint to the apartment administrators or chengguan (City Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau), same as ever.

And while we may learn more about what our leaders are doing, this will not be the sort of information we are interested in. I mean, it's all very well for a pop personality like Dee Hsu to publish pictures of herself sitting on the toilet and tell the world what she had for lunch, but it won't work for officials.

Those politicians who drunkenly tweet after a few too many glasses of Maotai at banquets will be quickly weeded out. What we will get, in fact, is more political correctness. The tweets will be like mini press releases, informing us of all the important meetings and factory line inspections our leaders are doing on our behalf.

In the United States, for example, where they're used to this sort of thing (President Barack Obama has about 7.13 million followers), it was found that politicians principally use Twitter as a one-way method of communication and as such their tweets are totally self serving and 80 percent comprised of links to (positive) articles about them, or short press releases. And there's little or no entertainment value in press releases, I can assure you.

Also, do you really think that the majority of these tweeting pop stars, businessmen and now politicians are really twiddling their thumbs over smart phones and tweetboards? To all those who answered in the affirmative: Hahahaha! You're too naive.

I have a friend in PR whose job is to update businessmen's websites and micro blogs. Basically, he's a ghostwriter and tells everyone how much he (his boss) likes one-to-one communication, tells them what he thinks they want to hear and sends it out without even checking whether its what his boss is thinking. It's just public relations and business as usual.

My friend opines that, frankly, it would be political suicide if an official actually did send his own tweets, because he would inevitably go "off message" and say something controversial. "Messaging needs massaging," as he puts it.