Twitter officially launched @Anywhere at the Chirp conference.  The program is basically a contextual integration of Twitter within publisher sites.  Chloe Sladden, Dir of Media Partnerships at Twitter, described it as a way to shift a page view into a relationship.  Users can immediately follow people or learn more about the person seamlessly from a destination site (when that person is mentioned).

Dick Costolo, the COO, gave some background on why this makes sense for Twitter.

He mentioned Twitter.com has 180mm unique visitors.  Yet a lot more people say “yes I’m a Twitter user” than are registered users. So people seeing are consuming tweets and getting value from them across the web on places like HuffPo etc.  Using this syndication of Tweets to capture more registered users is the driving objective for Twitter.

For users, @Anywhere is about removing any friction in the process of consumption and following.  With a few lines of JavaScript, publishers can bring Twitter into their own experiences.  The program has few components including:

1. Sign-in and Sign-up: connecting to Twitter from the publisher site (like OAuth)

2. Hover Cards: Twitter profile for people contextually related to pages; ability to follow

3. Tweet Box: to Tweet from the destination site

Yahoo, The NYTimes and MSNBC all presented various implementations of the program. 

@Anywhere could be more useful to publishers if the Hover Cards could be customized and curated to promote the overall presence of our sites on Twitter.  For example, if an editor from Yahoo News has a hover card, that would be a good place to also list our other Twitter accounts like @YahooNews or our topical accounts like Haiti Earthquake.  It would also be great to surface a particularly useful or popular tweet of the day from one of these accounts.  There are several extensions like this which would grow engagement.  From a publisher standpoint, @Anywhere will connect channels for distribution of your content.   That’s good.

That said, there are so many entities in a typical content page (people, places, businesses and brands mentioned in articles), so a publisher will not want to overdue it.  Having too many contextual integrations within a page could be a distraction and impact engagement metrics.  Overall, this is a great step forward to bring real-time streams into core content experiences.  We’ll see a blending of the two and @Anywhere may be at the center of all of that.  Aside from being a really cool name, this initiative is one step that furthers Twitter’s chances of mainstream adoption. Read more »

• We Just Tested Twitter's @anywhere
• Twitter's @Anywhere platform is now live
• If you want to follow @Anywhere
• Twitter Makes Itself More Useful

Filed under: Events, Web Apps, Yahoo!, Twitter | 1 Comment »

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