Twitter Developing At Anywhere

[engine]

Twitter Launches At Anywhere [blog.twitter.com]

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. 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. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.


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—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

[weeks]

Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline...

Ok, I imagined it. This is called a link. Exciting, this linking, it is.

...tweet about a video without leaving YouTube...

YouTube puts a little Twitter button on each page. Whoa!

...discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page...

It's SO hard to find new Twitter accounts to follow. There is a demand for this?

Obviously, I'm missing something here. I use the Twitter widget box and AddThis-type links/buttons to good effect on some web sites. This is something more, but, what...? Is @Anywhere anything?

[JS_Harris]

@anywhere? I'll buy into that when Twitter mentions working with Google.

[Silvery]

Widgets. I believe what they're referring to as a "framework" is more commonly called a "widget".

I hope they offer APIs, too, for those who'd like to have the content actually appearing in the HTML of pages for some marginal SEO benefit. AJAXy widgets are all well and good, but SOA is not all that hard -- XML/RSS feeds are not that difficult to implement, particularly for the sorts of sites they mentioned.

[Sierra_Dad]

@anywhere? I'll buy into that when Twitter mentions working with Google.

Well, they must have done some of that at least if they have a button on YouTube.

[claus]

Oh no. Now at Bing and Yahoo as well as Google. Is this disease unstoppable?

One day I hope that the world will discover that Twitter is nothing but spam. So far I have not found any of it useful, or even mildly enjoyable or entertaining one single time.

[J_RaD]

I've found 0 use for twitter.

[MWpro]

I've found 0 use for twitter.

Think cooler form of RSS feed. If you make a new blog post, for example, you can tweet it to inform your followers to check it out.

This spikes traffic to my site, almost as if you were to throw a handfull of breadcrumbs in the air to feed the pigeons in New York City. They come flocking to the content.

[incrediBILL]

I've found 0 use for twitter.

Then you obviously don't use Comcast broadband.

Every time I've had a problem, the handful of Comcast techs on Twitter can either tell you the issue or resolve the problem in seconds or minutes without waiting an hour in a phone queue to talk to a front line flunky.

Heck, I didn't even go looking for Comcast support on Twitter, I was just tweeting some complaints about Comcast and they found me and resolved the problem.

Now THAT's a truly valuable use of social media, reputation management, and superior tech support.

I feel bad for people that don't know any better and still call the 800# because they're just getting jerked around.

Go twitter! ;)

[J_RaD]

I do, and I never have any issues with it.

[mcneely]

@MWpro

This spikes traffic to my site, almost as if you were to throw a handfull of breadcrumbs in the air to feed the pigeons in New York City. They come flocking to the content.

um .. Don't you mean "The site scrapers come flocking to the content"?

I've seen more site scrapers coming out of Twitter after a blog post than actual real time visitors, by a margin of nearly 100 to 1 .. Twitter is a site scraper's paradise.

[ronin]

SMS is (normally) one-to-one.

RSS is one-to-many.

Twitter is one-to-many + many-to-one + one-to-one.

Twitter is RSS with feedback functionality - it is to RSS what articles with comment functionality are to traditional comment-less articles.

That's the platform. What people use it for is another issue entirely. If you're going to blame Twitter for meaningless spam, you might as well blame the W3C for scraper sites.

The great thing about twitter - as with RSS, but UNLIKE email - is that the moment you receive any spam at all, you can switch it off with one click.

[nickora]

ok, hold on so you can tweet about a page from any page without going to twitter, so you can just pump loads of information in without checking your account at all fine... so when you do check your twitter account and its bloated with billions of people doing exactly the same, your gona want some pretty good filters to give you the information that you want hey! - just hope they have that too!