Twitter may already seem hard to escape on the Web, but it is now trying to become truly ubiquitous.
Its new @anywhere platform, announced at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, will allow other sites to integrate Twitter deeply into their own content pages. A dozen sites, including The New York Times, Amazon.com, msnbc.com and The Huffington Post are participating in the launch.
Sites that implement @anywhere will be able to add Twitter-rich hyperlinks; when a user rolls over a link to, say, the name of a person, a bubble will appear with that person’s Twitter handle, last Tweet and other information. The new platform will also allow users to perform some actions — such as following and retweeting — without leaving the partner site.
“The big thing that @everywhere does is reduce friction,” said Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announcing the platform during a conversation with Umair Haque. “It gives [sites] a connection back to the users that [they] didn’t have before.”
@anywhere will also work like Facebook Connect, allowing Twitter users to sign into partner sites with their Twitter login information.
At first blush, @anywhere looks to be a win/win for Twitter and the sites that use it. Twitter will probably see an uptick in activity from casual users who can’t be bothered to go to Twitter.com or a Twitter client just to share a link, and the sites will keep that traffic on their sites, while earning some cred with the social media set.
Already, social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are driving lots of traffic to mainstream media sites. This, Twitter hopes, will accelerate that trend.
