San Francisco — In an attempt to expand its scope across the Internet, Twitter users will soon be able to tweet, connect and follow on everyday sites such as YouTube and eBay without having to go back to their own Twitter page. Twitter CEO Evan Williams on Monday announced a new application called “@Anywhere” that empowers users to send and receive 140-character messages while surfing the web.
When it is officially becomes operational in the coming months, the new platform dubbed “@anywhere,” with simple script authorizes sites to link web content to Twitter accounts that users can follow journalists directly from their byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo home page.
“This is not an ad platform, it is an ‘at’ platform,” Twitter co-founder Williams said while announcing @Anywhere during an on-stage chat at a South By South West Interactive gathering here.
“It should result in more followers for a site and more fans talking on Twitter,” Williams said.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams responding to questions from Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque during Monday’s keynote.
Williams, addressing a massive crowd at South by Southwest explained that participating sites can now use a “hover card” — a little dialogue boxes that pops up on-screen so visitors can fire off or read messages without having to go to the microblogging service’s website. Similarly, @Anywhere also allows for names on Web pages to be highlighted and used to link to an individual’s Twitter stream.
The New York Times Co., Bing, YouTube, Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo! were among the leading Web sites that will show Twitter updates, Williams said at a conference in Austin, Texas.
“We are excited to support @Anywhere, enabling our users to permit Twitter data sharing with their Yahoo! ID in a way that authorizes them to consume their Twitter feeds on Yahoo! and to share Yahoo! content to Twitter,” Yahoo! executive Cody Simms said in a release.
Initially, 13 sites will accommodate the service, he said.
“It is only scratching the surface,” Williams said. “These big partners are not the only ones we want to limit it to.”
The Twitter Mascot…
With 75 million users transmitting 50 million tweets a day, Twitter has been exploring new avenues to let users do more without being hit with irrelevant tweets.
@Anywhere is free for publishers interested in weaving Twitter into their websites, according to the San Francisco-based firm. Twitter, which has already signed licensing deals with Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Yahoo Inc., is looking for more sources of revenue.
“Hopefully, they will embrace the new platform and see it as a way to integrate Twitter and disseminate what is good,” Williams said of online news services and other websites that thrive on providing fresh information.
With @anywhere Twitter aims to simplify problems of the increasingly crowded, noisy network: “If they are breaking news it is going to spread faster on Twitter and they are adding value.”
“The big thing @anywhere does is reduce friction,” Williams announced at the venue where Twitter burst on the scene three years ago. “You could be reading your favorite columnist…. Like most things we build with Twitter, we leave a lot of the innovation up to developers and third-parties … but some of the obvious things are you can easily tweet from the column itself if you want to tell people about it, and you may just want to follow the columnist … without going back to Twitter, straight from the byline.”
In a blog post announcing @anywhere, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone stated that how he and Williams formulated Twitter with an approach that did not require a relationship model like a social network.
“Keeping things open indicates that you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account,” Stone said. “As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.”
Stone further added that Twitter has designed a new set of frameworks for adding the Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, Stone promised, sites will be able to re-create open interactions typically found on Twitter.com for their own visitors.
“Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented, but this is a different approach because we have created something incredibly simple,” Stone wrote. “Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of JavaScript.”
Williams said the new application would even make it simpler for users to keep in touch with other members they are following.
“What we are doing is lowering the barriers to using Twitter,” Williams said.
“There is something interesting on Twitter for everybody, but not everybody knows that.”
Williams unveiled the idea at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Texas, the event where he announced Twitter three years ago.
It seems that advertisers will have to keep their fingers crossed for a bit longer for the anticipated Twitter ad platform that could help the micro-blogging service generate significant revenue.