Today, the Illinois Policy Institute, the state’s leading free market think tank, announced the launch of TweetIllinois.org, a website designed to encourage better communication between legislators and constituents.

Tweet Illinois echoes the format of a successful national site, TweetCongress.org, where national representatives “tweet” real-time updates to their constituents using Twitter, the popular online social networking service. TweetIllinois.org gathers the short, electronic messages (or “tweets”) of Illinois legislators and publishes them in a central location.

TweetIllinois.org offers an exciting new way for citizens to communicate with their representatives in Springfield, and vice versa. Twitter has been used successfully in a number of fields to enhance connectivity and understanding. What better arena to use it than in politics?