In a move to broaden its reach across the Internet, Twitter on Monday announced a new feature that lets users send and receive 140-character messages while surfing the web. Dubbed @anywhere, Twitter’s latest service gives sites like Amazon.com, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC, The New York Times, Yahoo and YouTube the ability to stream the millions of daily tweets Twitter users send every day.
Evan Williams, CEO and cofounder of Twitter, announced the feature at a presentation at the South by Southwest interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Many observers reportedly expected Twitter to announce a new advertising platform, but instead were greeted with news about something that resembles Facebook Connect.
“This is Twitter’s version of Facebook Connect. Not literally, but it’s a comparable way to extend and distribute Twitter throughout the Internet and piggyback on the traffic of a range of sites,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “Twitter has become very popular, but it has a core base of active users. This could potentially dramatically expand and further popularize the service.”
Twitter, Twitter Everywhere
In a blog post announcing @anywhere, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone explained how he and Williams designed Twitter with an approach that didn’t require a relationship model like a social network.
“Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account,” Stone said. “As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.”
Stone explained that Twitter has developed a new set of frameworks for adding the Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, Stone promised, sites will be able to re-create open…