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Twitter Announces @anywhere Platform, Partners With Web Heavyweights

by Thomas Houston on March 15, 2010 at 05:20 PM

Here at SXSW, during an awkward, winding discussion between Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Umair Haque of Havas Media Lab, the latest Twitter addition was announced.

After hopping onstage, Evan kicked off the hour-long talk by immediately revealing and demoing @anywhere, a framework that aims to make Twitter and tweets more accessible across the Web. Firstly, hovercards -- which are already seen on Twitter and allow micro-bloggers to pull up another user's information without leaving a page -- can now be integrated into partner sites. For example, if you are looking at a Huffington Post article on the Flaming Lips, you'll now be able to pull up the band's latest tweets, list of followers, and still more -- all from directly within the story.

Secondly, partner sites will now be able to accept Twitter log-ins, meaning that tweeters will be able to log in to the New York Times via their Twitter accounts, much as Facebook users are able to do with Facebook Connect. Similarly, you'll be able to follow the Twitter accounts of your favorite sites and writers while you're on an external site, effectively ending the need to jump back to Twitter.

Twitter confirmed some of the Web's biggest sites as partners for launch: Amazon, YouTube, Bing, Citysearch, SalesForce, Huffington Post, Yahoo!, Meebo, MSNBC, Advertising Age, Digg, eBay, and the New York Times. And that's just to start.

While some of these features have been available to developers before, implementation meant understanding and working with the Twitter API. It's great for developers, but your average blogger probably won't know where to begin. With @anywhere, Twitter will provide a few simple lines of javascript for Web site owners to add these features to their own sites.

Following the keynote, Biz Stone wrote about the nature of Twitter on the company's blog, suggesting an unspoken rivalry with Facebook: "When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach -- we didn't require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters and more."

Late Night's Gavin Purcell captured the scale of @anywhere well by tweeting, "Twitter takes a step closer to being address book/white pages for everyone on the internet."

Tags: BreakingNews, evan williams, EvanWilliams, hovercards, sxsw, sxsw2010, top, twitter

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