@anywhere: Twitter's New Service
Popular social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter announced a new service at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW). The new service is called @anywhere and is meant to embed Twitter functionality into other websites. What @anywhere does is provide websites with the tools needed to let Twitter users follow feeds and share media without having to go to Twitter.com.
To put it bluntly, if you own a site or a personal blog, with @anywhere you will be able to integrate Twitter info and features into your site or personal blog. When someone visits your personal blog and places the mouse cursor over your name, a popup could appear and present the visitor with a Twitter box where said visitor can see if he’s following you on Twitter or not. The box could also allow the user to start following you, or it could allow the user to send you a tweet directly from the site.
Furthermore, @anywhere could be used similarly to Facebook Connect as a login provider. Twitter users could log into your website by using their Twitter login credentials.
“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,” commented Twitter Co-Founder, Biz Stone.
The first sites to implement @anywhere include big names such as Yahoo!, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, Meebo, and Digg.
In related Twitter news, the micro-blogging site recently introduced a new service that would prevent malicious links from being posted to Twitter. This new service is meant to protect the Twitter user from phishing attacks and other scams. All links posted to Twitter are routed to this new service that check to see if they’re malicious or not. More details here.
In related social networking news, you should know that the CEO of Ning has stepped down after more than 5 years as the company’s lead. Read more about it here.
To put it bluntly, if you own a site or a personal blog, with @anywhere you will be able to integrate Twitter info and features into your site or personal blog. When someone visits your personal blog and places the mouse cursor over your name, a popup could appear and present the visitor with a Twitter box where said visitor can see if he’s following you on Twitter or not. The box could also allow the user to start following you, or it could allow the user to send you a tweet directly from the site.
Furthermore, @anywhere could be used similarly to Facebook Connect as a login provider. Twitter users could log into your website by using their Twitter login credentials.
“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,” commented Twitter Co-Founder, Biz Stone.
The first sites to implement @anywhere include big names such as Yahoo!, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, Meebo, and Digg.
In related Twitter news, the micro-blogging site recently introduced a new service that would prevent malicious links from being posted to Twitter. This new service is meant to protect the Twitter user from phishing attacks and other scams. All links posted to Twitter are routed to this new service that check to see if they’re malicious or not. More details here.
In related social networking news, you should know that the CEO of Ning has stepped down after more than 5 years as the company’s lead. Read more about it here.
