Twitter burrows deeper into web with @Anywhere

 

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By Alex Watson in Austin and Stuart Turton

Posted on 16 Mar 2010 at 08:26

Twitter has announced its @Anywhere platform, as the micro-blogging service attempts to weave itself even more deeply into the fabric of the web.

The platform was introduced by Twitter chief executive Evan Williams at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, and will allow websites such as Amazon and the New York Times to integrate Twitter services.

In an example shown on stage, Williams demonstrated how users will soon be able to follow a journalist's Twitter feed simply by clicking on the byline of one of their stories - enabling easy commenting or forwarding of links, without going back to Twitter.com or a third-party client.

Thirteen websites will be using @Anywhere at launch, including the New York Times, Amazon and YouTube.

Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we've created something incredibly simple

"Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we've created something incredibly simple," wrote Williams on the Twitter blog.

"Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in 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," he concluded.

According to Williams, @Anywhere addresses the biggest challenge with Twitter – discovering Tweets that were useful to you. “Discovery is the hardest challenge… we know there’s all this valuable info buried in the Twitter network, but there are 50 million Tweets a day, so how do you find the 100 which are most valuable for you?”

“There’s something interesting on Twitter for everyone. Oh, the Flaming Lips are on Twitter? I can get updates from the band? That’s cool. We need to tell people that.”

In an ironic development, the power of Twitter was shown on stage with the crowd using the micro-blogging services to complain that Umair Haque - Williams' interviewer - was being overly deferential in his style.