Twitter: @Anywhere announcement

Twitter just announced @anywhere platform – notice who is missing? Google! Dunno why, Bing is there, but there must be a war forming  between Twits vs Googlers. Anyway here’s my thoughts, right after the Twitter blog/press release:

Monday, March 15, 2010

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. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. 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.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. 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. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be part of our favorite sites!

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. 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. 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.

I’m not a hundred percent sure what @anywhere offers that current widgets don’t already offer – a Twitter created widget rather than a 3rd party developer widget created from the Twitter API. For bloggers, copying and pasting a few lines of code from one source looks pretty much like the line of code from another.

For example click on Get Widget below

and you’ll see code (once you choose your platform like WordPress) similar to

[code] <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://cdn.widgetserver.com/syndication/subscriber/InsertWidget.js”></script><script>if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget(‘51997582-ea6c-423d-94c4-42f6280c8475’);</script><noscript>Get the <a href=”http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/twidget”>Twitter Widget</a> widget and many other <a href=”http://www.widgetbox.com/”>great free widgets</a> at <a href=”http://www.widgetbox.com”>Widgetbox</a>! Not seeing a widget? (<a href=”http://docs.widgetbox.com/using-widgets/installing-widgets/why-cant-i-see-my-widget/”>More info</a>)</noscript> [/code]

Get widget doesn’t work in this case because personalisation means you usually want to change the name and colours, so you have to go back to the Widgetbox page. I think the @anywhere offers an overlay perhaps onto YouTube? But there are already plugins that let you tweet alongside content so I’m not sure how that will work differently. I’m assuming it

• builds in the short link bit.ly to the video,
• aggregates the tweets about that video together on YouTube
• publishes them on Twitter with a hashtag #video or #nameofvid

Anyway, you know what they say about “assuming”… it makes an ass out of u and ming. 😛

Hmmm has possibilities for conferences – the tweets about the conference aggregate on the page, on Twitter automagically around the #hashtag. Still the widgets do this already don’t they?

Another overlay that would be interesting is a “Follow Me” one – the one below is on Twitter itself but imagine if it popped up all over the ‘net? Identity issues would be reduced for one…

Perhaps you hover over the journalist’s name on The Sydney Morning Herald or New York Times and get that popup – though I’ve seen similar with not only Twitter but LinkedIn, Facebook, all of em in the overlay.

Web 3.0 – Little bits everywhere. @anywhere.

Wot’s your take on @anywhere then? Just 3rd party API developers widgets taken away from 3rd party? Or something more?