Selected Takes From Twitterers on Obama's Nobel Prize Win

But Obama has been in office eight months. His ambitious hopes for a peace deal in the Middle East and a nuclear-free world are just getting started. No doubt the Nobel Committee want this prize to add momentum to those plans. But the award also risks adding to the huge burden of expectations that Obama carried when he entered office. The reality of governing has already proved how ridiculous many of those expectations were. (See pictures of Barack Obama's nation of hope.)

And now Obama is the Nobel Peace Prize winner. "Frankly it seems premature when he hasn't been in office even a year yet, and has not yet actually achieved the goals he set out à ‚¬" although he certainly has made some very noteworthy efforts," says Mark Fitzpatrick, Senior Fellow for Non-proliferation at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies. "I think he will be embarrassed by it and it will be unhelpful in the domestic milieu."

That's an understatement. As TIME's Mark Halperin notes on The Page, "Barack Obama's critics have long accused him of being a man of 'just words,' rather than concrete actions and accomplishments. The stunning decision to award him the Nobel Peace Prize for, basically, his rhetoric, will almost certainly infuriate his detractors in America more than it will delight his supporters." (Read Mark Halperin's take on The Page.)