At the recent SXSW Conference, Twitter Co Founder Ev Williams announced a major framework they have in the pipeline called @anywhere.
The idea sprouted from the difficulty people have when they browse web sites and want to follow particular persons or businesses they come across on Twitter. At the moment, if you want to do this, unless there is an obvious “Follow me on Twitter” link, you need to conduct a search for the person or business on Twitter, locate their account and then login to your Twitter account to add them.
@anywhere will apparently enable web surfers to interact and follow people directly from their web sites with a single click. From the official blog post :
“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…
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…”
Participating site owners won’t need an API to make this happen either – apparently @anywhere will run via a few lines of javascript added to their HTML code. Already, 13 of the biggest web players have signed up for @anywhere, including sites like Amazon, Bing, Yahoo! and YouTube.
No launch date has been announced yet, but Twitter’s blog hints it will be *soon*.
I take it google is opting out on including @anywhere on their browser? Nice article Kalena.