After much poking and prodding, former Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., has finally acquiesced to public calls for him to join the Twittersphere.

The wordy wonk admitted to HOH that he had not, until very recently, completely grasped the myriad benefits of the microblogging service, choosing to reserve his verbose rants for more traditional media outlets.

But all that changed last week, when Frank took control of the long dormant @BarneyFrank account a cyber-squatter had been sitting on.

“If there were any followers, they were at a great distance,” Frank said of the account, which he said Twitter had effectively deactivated because of sustained inactivity.

The following has steadily creeped up to around 2,800 since Frank took the reins — a growing audience that includes many folks who know how to cram a whole lotta fun into tightly knit social media bios:

For his part, Frank is looking forward to exploring the new (to him, anyway) medium. He mapped out plans to share his latest columns penned for the Portland Press Herald, blast out alerts about pending television hits and perhaps tease fans with snippets from that autobiography he’s long been threatening to write.