Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

The number of Ukrainians using twitter has reached 16,000, according to some reports. The Interenet-Ukraine non-profit organization on Dec. 25 launched a presidential election monitoring project based on the social networking service Twitter.

The project features a website connecting Twitter users across Ukraine, as well as election monitoring accounts on Facebook, Yandex's fotki page and Youtube.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. The service was used to attract amd sustain foreign interest during recent unrest in Iran and following April parliamentary elections in Moldova.

The project's hash tag for Ukraine's presidential election is #elect_ua.

Internet-Ukraine said the project is funded by the Internews Network, an international organization supported by private donations and mostly Western governments.

There are currently about 16,000 Ukrainians using Twitter, according to a November 2009 study by the Yandex search company.