The more than 165,000 people who are following Barack Obama on Twitter might think that, after winning the national election, the president-elect would have a lot to talk about.

Or at least he’d type in a few status updates to the social networking site every now and then.

But since Nov. 5, Twitter member BarackObama’s account has been silent — and people like Hannah Litzenberger, a senior in natural resources who has been following Obama since August, have noticed. The president-elect is the most followed user of Twitter, a social networking site that allows people to receive constant updates about their friends’ whereabouts and activities, but his account has been inactive for two months.

“I saw one of my other friends was following him on Twitter and I was like, Whoa, Barack Obama has a Twitter — that’s awesome,” she said. “It felt like there was at least one update every day, whenever he was doing a campaign stop somewhere. I really liked it because definitely I check Twitter all the time, so I liked getting updates through Twitter about where he was going.”

She said she didn’t notice Obama’s absence from the site until last month, and although she didn’t think much about it at the time — the campaign had ended, after all — she said she would “love to still get updates because I’m tired of getting e-mails.”

“Now that he’s appointing so many of the secretaries and important people for his cabinet, I’d like to see updates about that,” she said.

But there are other ways to find out who Obama has chosen for his team. The New York Times reported that Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a CNN correspondent and neurosurgeon who is also a member of Twitter, recently posted an update that indicated Obama had approached him about becoming surgeon general.

So why hasn’t Obama been delivering this news first hand? Andrew Taylor, head of the political science department, said it’s because of laws that differentiate the way politicians are allowed to campaign from the way they are allowed to govern.

“It has to do with ethics,” Taylor said. “There has never been a president who was able to communicate, personally, with so many people before in this way. They haven’t had the technology before.”

Although reports have stated Obama’s Blackberry has been confiscated and he is unable to personally communicate through e-mail, “the question is, now, how does this fit in the limits on politicking that the president can engage in? … There is a line, but the trouble is trying to work out how the technology fits into this approach. Deciding where the use of this technology becomes illegal use of politics.”

And unfortunately for Obama and his team, Taylor said, the support he has carried through technology like texting, personal e-mails and Twitter updates is out of the question — for now — for political figures.

“It’s not the technology so much that’s the problem here,” he said. “It’s the use of politics as a president.”