Reports are emerging that the presidential Twitter account is losing a reasonably large number of followers in its present campaign to reach an agreement on the debt ceiling. When taken in context, the loss of followers is small, and I argue that it’s not policy disagreement but Twitter etiquette violations that are losing the president his followers.

SPAMTASTIC? — U.S. President Barack Obama has been calling on supporters to contact lawmakers.

Meanwhile, Mashable reports that NM Incite counted 22,000 uses of the #compromise hashtag the @BarackObama account has been pushing. For an account with more than 9 million followers, a loss of 30,000 is no biggie.

I do think there is a reason for the rather sizable drop. As any long-time Twitter user knows, any period of rapidfire tweeting will result in a follower shift. If you happen to hold the key to world news and tweet incessantly about it, you can go from dozens to hundreds of thousands of followers overnight. But if you’re following some event that many of your followers don’t care about, some less loyal contacts will bail on you in annoyance.

So, the president’s account has lost some followers. Who cares? Politicians, investors, and citizens alike have much more to lose if this isn’t resolved well.

Given how easy it is to annoy followers with spammy posts, it might be worth note how few followers that account lost. What do you think?

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed a meeting in April with leaders of technology companies to discuss how to improve the government’s information technology infrastructure. From The Hill‘s Hillicon Valley blog:

“Twenty years ago, people who came to work in the federal government had better technology at work than at home,” said [Peter] Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Now that’s no longer the case.

“The American people deserve better service from their government, and better return for their tax dollars.”

The White House release that included Orszag’s comments said one “specific source” of ineffective and inefficient government is the huge technology gap between the public and private sectors that results in billions of dollars in waste, slow and inadequate customer service and a lack of transparency about how dollars are spent.

This doesn’t mean the public will necessarily see the physical results of any upgrade. The inefficiency is seen as within the government, rather than in the government’s interactions with citizens.

“Improving the technology our government uses isn’t about having the fanciest bells and whistles on our websites — it’s about how we use the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars to make government work better for them,” Obama said in a statement.

It’s not every day that you read a lead political story in The New York Times and find 10 mentions of “information.”* But in today’s report on the intelligence failures that allowed a man to board a flight to the United States with explosives in his pants, information aggregation, processing, and distribution is the core of the story.

The political noise since Sunday has been over whether “the system worked,” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano gracelessly stated (though she clarified later). President Barack Obama yesterday noted that there was a “systemic failure” in connecting information about this particular attacker and signals that a “Nigerian” may be part of an upcoming attack. Obama said, however, that “once the suspect attempted to take down Flight 253, after his attempt, it’s clear that passengers and crew, our homeland security systems, and our aviation security took all appropriate actions.”

The confusion here comes from the fact that there are two systems under discussion. An information system built to gather, analyze, and redistribute intelligence failed, but a response system designed to deal with a crisis apparently worked.

This is a rare case in which the collection, processing, and use of information by a government makes headlines. Below the political blame-seeking and analyses of implications for an “embattled” White House before midterm elections that are still a year away lies a serious discussion of the ability of the United States government to manage security-related information.

The information system that failed on Sept. 11, 2001, was changed drastically with the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which were each intended to be central nodes for better cooperation among bureaucracies for national security. The new system, in this case, suffered from familiar failures.

Ideally, the system would have put the attacker on a no-fly list (though as security researcher Chris Soghoian has shown, this may not have stopped him from flying). He wasn’t on the list, because no one connected his father’s statements that he might be involved with terrorists in Yemen with other intelligence about a coming attack by a Nigerian. Aside from bureaucratic procedure, it seems a variety of information architectures and processing rules might have made this connection more apparent, either by human or automated analysis.

* There were 10 mentions in the print edition. Online may be different.

I don’t want to overstate anything, as a cursory Google search offers no confirmation, but from the looks of this photograph from the official White House Flickr feed, sometimes having a meeting in the Oval Office means checking your tech at the door.

The official caption reads: “Cell phones are left outside the Oval Office during a meeting with President Barack Obama, May 25, 2009.” As commenter clareperretta points out it would be fun to know what the little card on the table says.

The Flickr account itself is pretty cool. Not quite Hugo Chávez’ Aló Presidente, but it’s part of some interesting things the present administration is doing with online publishing.

UPDATE: Even if you’re an important member of Congress, you leave it outside. This image from outside the cabinet room.