Twitter extends openness with @Anywhere’ platform

By Partho, Gaea News Network
Tuesday, March 16, 2010

“Openness is really a survivor technique” is what Twitter CEO Evan Williams exhorted while announcing their benchmark platform @Anywhere in a keynote address at South by Southwest conference. SXSWi is more or less the debut ground for Twitter, from where it emerged as an instant hit with the techies. Twitter buffs were eagerly anticipating a knock over this session. Drawing parallel to characteristic openness, Twitter announced @Anywhere that has been designed to spread microblogging network’s profiles, tweets and possibly advertising across the web. @Anywhere is a platform to pull Twitter links and data onto partner sites and media outlets.

The New Approach

The new set of framework will offer Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Sites we visit everyday will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com.

Twitter offers an open technology platform and its APIs are implemented widely. However, with @anywhere Twitter adopts a new approach that is remarkable user-friendly. With the new approach sites owners will be able to escape implementation of APIs. They are just required to drop a few lines of javascript.

The platform will be initially launched with only a number of sites including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

The Live Demo

Williams short demo at SXSWi cleared the air on @Anywhere.

@Anywhere Twitter shows hovercards that bring up Twitter information with mouse-over. It gives a pop-up that shows extended information about a person, and distributes them across websites that link to Twitter profiles. Imitating Facebook connect, the new platform will allow users or readers connect with others Twitter accounts and access related facilities. For instance you can instantly connect with a newspaper columnist’s Twitter account by clicking on his or her byline. Again, you will be able to tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page.
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Williams explained that

At Anywhere reduces friction. Some of the obvious things are, you can tweet from the column itself. The big thing is that you might want to follow the columnist.

A report quoting company’s head of product management last month stated that Twitter was gearing up to launch an ad platform in conjunction with SXSWi. However, Williams clarified that “it’s not an ad platform, it’s an ‘@’ platform,” referring to the syntax of using the ‘@’ symbol to denote communication between individual Twitter users.”

From its initial days Twitter adopted the openness policy allowing users to browse site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters and more. Clearly, @Anywhere will be an fillip to its transparency model.We can wait to see how the new platform adds to Twitter’s openness, until the platform is eventually launched.

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