Tuesday, March 17 is going to be an exciting day. You get to pinch your non-green wearing friends, have an excuse to be drunk in public in the middle of the week and you can witness the first ever Twitterview!

As a journalist and Web-geek, I feel it is my duty to blog about this. At 12 noon on Tuesday, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News will conduct a full interview with Senator John McCain using only Twitter. That’s right, the site that confines your posts to 140 characters. I’m a big Twitterphile and apparently so is John McCain. He updates about his day and favorite sports like anyone else, but he’s also become popular for doing countdowns on pork spending in the upcoming stimulus package. So it makes a lot of sense that he’d go for this concept.

Stephanopoulos got the idea for the Twitterview when he asked my own state senator, Claire McCaskill, via Twitter why she suddenly decided to vote no on the $410-billion omnibus budget bill since she had said she was supporting it before. She tweeted him back:

“George S.:Ultimately just couldn’t do it. Not just earmrks tho, also increase in spendng(8%too much)& failure to reconcile $ with stimuls.”

How cool. I know that McCain and several other Twitter-smart politicians respond to people and read the replies. It makes people feel more connected to their politicians and it’s smart of them to keep people updated via a popular tool like Twitter. I’m excited for the Twitterview and what this means for journalism. Will a lot of people tune in? Will it engage people? Will this be a stepping stone for more online live interviews on social networks?

We shall see.

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