At this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Twitter CEO Evan Williams unveiled @Anywhere, a new set of tools aimed at Twitter partner sites—think media outlets, retailers, celebrities, and other big names—to embed Twitter feeds and functionality in their sites without making people rush off to Twitter.com to say what they really think in 140 characters or less. The idea is to enable Twitter users to send and receive tweets while they’re already visiting these other sites, instead of popping back to the main Twitter site or turning to a dedicated Twitter application. And rather than being complicated to implement, Williams says it’ll just take a few lines of JavaScript.
“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,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in the company blog. “Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, Web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.”
Twitter hasn’t said when it expects to launch @Anywhere, but says it’ll have over a dozen major partners at launch, including Yahoo, the New York Times, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, Salesforce.com, Meebo, and AdvertisingAge. Twitter did not offer any details of the financial arrangements with these launch partners.
