As you may know, this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) opens this week in Austin, Texas and along with it comes its usual torrent of conferences, countless booths showcasing the latest proofs of concept technologies and of course, the legendary SXSW parties. And while Internet company CEOs and Web celebrities, students and people from the press hobbled around from one hallway to another in what is considered as the annual hub of the next hottest Web app, Twitter CEO Evan Williams sat casually as he previewed in his keynote the microblogging giant’s latest brainchild, @anywhere.
@anywhere is a new platform that allows for a deeper integration with other Web sites. This would allow users quick access to their Twitter profiles without actually leaving the current site their browsers are on. Moreover, it will let Web publishers and developers of partner sites to funnel in relevant tweets to their Web sites by simply inserting a few lines of javascript into the page’s code instead of wrestling with the complexities of personalizing the Twitter API (application program interface) to their needs.
SXSWi seems to be just the apt venue for Twitter to unveil a new capability since it was in its 2007 leg that the microblogging site made its debut and started picking up traction.
A demonstration of @anywhere followed the announcement. When users visit a Web site implementing it, people’s names and brands with supporting Twitter accounts would appear as hyperlinks. Having your cursor hover on top of a hyperlink will pull up a panel with that person or brand’s Twitter info and clicking on the link will direct you to their corresponding Twitter profile page.
Meanwhile, back on the Interwebs, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted the introductory announcement about @anywhere on the Twitter Blog where he says that this is a different approach for the company because they developed something simple to use and implement.
“We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the Web.” Stone said. “Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com.”
With @anywhere in place, users would be able to connect to their Twitter accounts through third party Web sites. This is not unlike how users of social networking site Facebook utilize its Facebook Connect feature to sign into other sites like CNET or PC World using their Facebook login credentials.
From this functionality, further development and future additional tweaks could lead to other features. “Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo home page—and that’s just the beginning.” Stone muses.
As of writing, the company has yet to reveal an actual timetable for @anywhere’s rollout though they have released a list of initial participating sites like Amazon, Bing, Digg, The Huffington Post, Meebo, The New York Times, Yahoo and YouTube among others. We should expect more partners to be added to the list when the new platform officially becomes available for prime-time.
“Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways and with @anywhere, Web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.” said Stone.
Tags: @anywhere, Social Media, SXSW, the right way, Twitter, Twitter Apps
