When people in the industry or anywhere else for that matter look to C-level participation in social media Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, is viewed as a pioneer. He was the first Fortune 500 CEO to blog. Well, now he has broken some new ground by being the first CEO of his stature (or maybe any for that matter) to tweet his resignation. Yup, he’s given his last 140 characters on behalf of Sun Microsystems.

The New York Times Bits column says:

Jonathan Schwartz, the last chief executive of Sun Microsystems, has become the first Fortune 200 boss to tweet his resignation.

Late Wednesday night, Mr. Schwartz used Twitter to publish a haiku about his exit from Oracle, which just completed its purchase of Sun last week.

“Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more,” Mr. Schwartz wrote.

Mr. Schwartz has been fond of using the Internet as a soapbox. At Sun, he became the first chief executive of a major company to put up his own blog. Mr. Schwartz also pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to put blogs on equal footing with press releases and filings when it comes to disclosing critical business matters to investors.

Considering the bad blood between Schwartz and his new boss Larry Ellison the resignation is not a surprise. Ellison last week said he expected the resignation was coming. Using Twitter as part of his resignation ‘process’ may have been a surprise, though. You have to give Schwartz credit for going out with a tweet.

Now it’ not like we are rooting for this to become a trend but I would suspect that many of you have your own favorite CEO that you would love to see craft a 140 character exit. (If you want to get creative and make a few for some of those folks feel free to leave them in the comments here). Are there any remaining social media firsts for business that you can think of?

In the end, what might be the best thing about all of this is the message of hope that we should all be focusing on that Schwartz left in an e-mail about his resignation.

As for what’s next, Mr. Schwartz said in an e-mail: “In the short run, I’m planning to spend some long overdue time with my family. Longer run, with a few million businesses and a few billion consumers on the Web, rumor has it there are some interesting opportunities to be had.”

Family time and opportunity. Now, that’s a good message and only 27 characters with spaces!

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!