Now that Twitter has introduced all of these fancy new things via its latest API, it’s time to get rid of some of the legacy stuff. One of the legacy items is a platform called @Anywhere, which was introduced by the company in 2010. I’m sorry to report that hovercards are getting the axe.
The new things that Twitter has introduced, namely embeddable timelines, make some of the old junk unnecessary. With those new features, comes constraints for developers, mostly centered around rate limits for content. You can read our full rundown of the Twitter version 1.1 API here.
In a post on the Twitter developer blog today, Jason Costa discussed what this @Anywhere sunsetting means for developers and site owners:
We’ve been growing the family of products that makes up Twitter for Websites, including, for example, yesterday’s launch of the ability to embed timelines on a website. As Twitter for Websites has evolved, it has improved upon many of the features we introduced with @Anywhere: Tweet box, follow, linkify a @username, sign-in, and the hovercard. As a result, we are sunsetting @Anywhere and focusing on continuing to build out Twitter for Websites.
Here is the original feature-set of @Anywhere:
- When you browse a site that uses @anywhere, people and brands that have Twitter accounts will be highlighted with a hyperlink. Mousing over that hyperlink will show a small box (a “hovercard”) containing their Twitter information, including their most recent tweet (in effect it means you don’t have to click over to Twitter’s homepage to see their Twitter profile)
- Publishers will be able to more deeply integrate their own Twitter profiles, making them easier for their readers to ‘follow’ them
- Sites will be able to implement @anywhere with a few lines of Javascript.
- The new platform is launching with a number of major sites and services, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Meebo, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, and eBay.
This is now of course all replaced by Twitter’s 1.1 API. I suggest hopping over to the full post to figure out the fixes to keep your Twitter implementation running smoothly on your site, as all of this will go away on December 6th.
[Image source: Flickr]