Russian president makes his inaugural tweet from Twitter headquarters

June 23, 2010 | Kim-Mai Cutler

It’s been a big week for social networking CEOs and politics.

Twitter’s head, Ev Williams, just hosted Russian president Dmitry Medvedev at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. The visit comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg met face-to-face with new U.K. prime minister David Cameron while in London.

The brief visit included the president’s very first tweet from the service through the @KremlinRussia account. So far his tweets have covered the view from his hotel (pictured below) and praise for San Francisco’s beauty. He seems to prefer TwitPic and the mobile web.

The visit comes as Russia tries to improve its image as a hospitable place for innovation and technology investment. However, on a recent visit to Russia, VentureBeat editor-in-chief, Matt Marshall, found that the country’s technology ecosystem still desperately needs more transparency and investment in infrastructure and a lot less corruption. Its economy is not appropriately diversified beyond resource wealth and oil. And its technical and entrepreneurial talent continues to leave. Young Andrey Ternovskiy, the 18-year-old founder of ChatRoulette, relocated to the U.S. at his first opportunity earlier this year, while several of Silicon Valley’s brightest stars, including Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Max Levchin, come from the former Soviet Union.

At the same time, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are growing rapidly enough that, at times, they have been compared to governments. Twitter’s active user base, numbering 125 million accounts, is almost as large as Russia’s population of 140 million people. At around 500 million active users, Facebook only lags China and India in the total number of people it serves.

Both companies support ecosystems of at least 100,000 developers who must grapple with every platform change the way citizens adjust to new laws. And both companies’ technologies have underpinned political movements like the Colombia FARC protests organized through Facebook or last year’s Twitter protests in Moldova that may foreshadow radical shifts in power between nation-states and the citizenry they are supposed to serve.