Twitter Announces @Anywhere Platform For Web Sites

You may have caught this in Danny Sullivan’s liveblogging of Ev William’s keynote at SXSW today, but just in case … Twitter has introduced a new platform called @anywhere that will allow web sites to integrate Twitter features more easily. The details seem a bit foggy to me, but it sounds like @anywhere takes many […]

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You may have caught this in Danny Sullivan’s liveblogging of Ev William’s keynote at SXSW today, but just in case … Twitter has introduced a new platform called @anywhere that will allow web sites to integrate Twitter features more easily.

The details seem a bit foggy to me, but it sounds like @anywhere takes many of the Twitter API functions/services and makes them available to web sites in a much simpler way: by adding a few lines of javascript. Some of the mentioned uses of this platform include:

  • being able to sign-in to third party web sites with your Twitter ID
  • a New York Times journalist’s byline would show her Twitter profile and let anyone follow her from the article on the Times’ web site
  • being able to tweet about a video from its YouTube page
  • discovering new Twitter users/account from Yahoo’s home page

Those are some of the uses listed in Danny’s liveblog and/or the Twitter blog post, both of which are linked above. DigitalBeat says the platform uses Twitter’s hovercards (pop-up windows) and may include advertising, too.

When @anywhere launches — and I haven’t seen any indication when that’ll be — there will be 13 partner sites, shown here:

twitter-anywhere

I notice that Bing and Yahoo are there, but Google isn’t. Google’s YouTube is a partner, however.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme, too.

Postscript: Yahoo has sent us a statement that explains a little more about its participation in @anywhere. The statement reads, in part: “…we’re excited to support @anywhere, allowing our users to authorize Twitter data sharing with their Yahoo! ID in a way that empowers them to consume their Twitter feeds on Yahoo! and to share Yahoo! content to Twitter.”


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About the author

Matt McGee
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Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.

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