Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced a new app platform Monday that will integrate the service into the rest of the web.
Dubbed @anywhere, the simple script empowers sites to link web content to Twitter accounts that users can follow without leaving the site.
Williams told a massive crowd at South by Southwest that participating sites can now use a hover card a little window that pops up on third-party websites when they mouse over an authors byline, for instance not only to reveal an associated Twitter account but provide a seamless way to follow that account. Similar hover cards can already be seen on Twitter.com when you mouse over a Twitter users handle.
With @anywhere Twitter aims to solve two vexing problems of the increasingly crowded, noisy network: Who should I follow? And what is that persons Twitter handle? Twitter has created recommendation lists, and there are a number of suggestion services. But compiling a crowd this way is tedious, and not conducive to serendipitous discovery. And as for who is who: Would you, for example, necessarily know that @plusk is really Ashton Kutcher?
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.
Ironically, Williams keynote was widely panned on Twitter. Many commenters reserved especially harsh criticisms for Williams onstage interlocutor, Umair Haque.
This is super painful. Feel a bit bad for @ev. a different format would have been more engaging, tweeted ramdac. We wanted to hear Ev speak. Not the guy that loved to hear himself speak.
In response to the complaints, Williams took the opportunity to use Twitter to solicit tougher questions after the keynote wrapped up.
Twitter @anywhere will likely put Twitter in front of all sorts of people who wouldn't have used it before. And as they become more exposed to the service, according to Forrester social media analyst Augie Ray, they'll be more likely to sign up for a Twitter account and become part of the conversation, instead of consuming information in a one-way fashion.
Dubbed @anywhere, the simple script empowers sites to link web content to Twitter accounts that users can follow without leaving the site.
Williams told a massive crowd at South by Southwest that participating sites can now use a hover card a little window that pops up on third-party websites when they mouse over an authors byline, for instance not only to reveal an associated Twitter account but provide a seamless way to follow that account. Similar hover cards can already be seen on Twitter.com when you mouse over a Twitter users handle.
With @anywhere Twitter aims to solve two vexing problems of the increasingly crowded, noisy network: Who should I follow? And what is that persons Twitter handle? Twitter has created recommendation lists, and there are a number of suggestion services. But compiling a crowd this way is tedious, and not conducive to serendipitous discovery. And as for who is who: Would you, for example, necessarily know that @plusk is really Ashton Kutcher?
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.
Ironically, Williams keynote was widely panned on Twitter. Many commenters reserved especially harsh criticisms for Williams onstage interlocutor, Umair Haque.
This is super painful. Feel a bit bad for @ev. a different format would have been more engaging, tweeted ramdac. We wanted to hear Ev speak. Not the guy that loved to hear himself speak.
In response to the complaints, Williams took the opportunity to use Twitter to solicit tougher questions after the keynote wrapped up.
Twitter @anywhere will likely put Twitter in front of all sorts of people who wouldn't have used it before. And as they become more exposed to the service, according to Forrester social media analyst Augie Ray, they'll be more likely to sign up for a Twitter account and become part of the conversation, instead of consuming information in a one-way fashion.
