Last month at SXSW, Twitter CEO Ev Williams announced @anywhere, a new platform that would allow external sites to integrate some key Twitter features (it sounds a lot like Facebook Connect). Williams named some initial launch partners and gave a cursory overview of what the service was supposed to achieve, but details were scant (though we later tried it out ourselves after stumbling across a testing site). Today at Chirp Twitter COO Dick Costolo is giving us the full run-down of what @anywhere is for. My live notes are below.
The goal of @anywhere is to embed Twitter in a site, like The Huffington Post, New York Times, etc. The goal is to remove the friction of using Twitter
Few lines of Javascript to get simple functionality up and running
Four pieces of functionality: Sing-in, Tweetbox, Hovercards, Connect.
One opportunity: when user is signing up for Twitter so they can follow one ESPN reporter, ESPN can tell them to follow other ESPN reporters
More sites integrating Twitter, and more engaged Twitter users both mean more opportunity for developers
Yahoo is now showcasing how they’re integrating @anywhere
Users can bring in the networks they already have. Authorize Twitter using OAuth, authorize: Pull whole twitter stream onto yahoo, pull tweets you write onto Yahoo, and share things you do on Yahoo to Twitter (you can uncheck these).
Now we’re looking at more media partnerships. New York Times is first. Traditionally journalists are more removed from readership, Twitter helps connect. NYT Bits blog has list of writers on one site. With Hovercards you do’t have to leave the page.
MSNBC is on stage now showing off their integration. Hovercards, OAuth login. Looking forward, could use @anywhere to only show tweets from MSNBC users, or only show tweets from certain topics.
Some companies have @anywhere live right now: Huffington Post, WSJ.com, Foursquare, Citysearch, Gowalla, MSNBC.com.
Developers can check out the code for @anywhere at dev.twitter.com/anywhere
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