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Details: Twitter's New @Anywhere Platform

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced at SXSW that his company is taking another step to integrate with the rest of the web with a new platform called @anywhere. Operators of third-party websites will be able to plug in @anywhere to integrate some basic Twitter functionality without requiring their users to navigate away from a page.

When you visit a website that supports @anywhere, you’ll be able to follow any Twitter () account associated with that site without navigating away to the profile at Twitter.com. The Twitter blog suggests that the platform will let you follow a participating journalist from his or her byline. It also suggests that you’ll be able to tweet about a YouTube () video without interrupting it.

More @anywhere features are planned; Twitter says the above-mentioned items are are “just the beginning.” Integrating with the rest of the web is a wise move. Facebook’s () Facebook Connect platform is dominating right now, and while Twitter has a similar login platform, it’s lost its head start when it comes to openness and integration.

The person or organization behind a website can drop some JavaScript in the website to integrate with @anywhere, so there won’t be any arcane Application Programming Interface (API) to learn and implement. Initial partners will include Amazon (), AdAge, Bing (), Citysearch, Digg (), eBay (), The Huffington Post, Meebo (), MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo (), and — as mentioned above — YouTube. Twitter hasn’t said when those sites will begin using @anywhere.

Future announcements regarding the platform will come from the @anywhere Twitter account — you get one guess as to what the username is. Platform/API guru Ryan Sarver promised “lots more details” at the Chirp () Twitter developer conference this April 14 and 15.

via mashable.com

Filed under  //   social media   twitter  
Posted March 15, 2010
 

Update: In Time For SXSW, Twitter Officially Turns On Geolocation

A few days ago, we spotted Twitter’s initial roll out of a geolocation feature on its Website. It appeared that Twitter was testing the feature because it quickly turned it off. Last night, the feature went back on, and Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone officially announced it.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, this is the first time Twitter has enabled geolocation on its site. To start Tweeting with your location attached, you need to enable the feature in your Twitter Account Settings. Once you’ve opted-in, you will be able to add your location information to all your Tweets or choose to add them to individual Tweets as you compose them. You can choose to share your exact location (your coordinates) or your neighborhood or town.

Currently, the feature only works with Firefox 3.5 and Chrome for Windows. If you decide you want to send a Tweet without your location, you can simply click the “x” next to your location to disable it. Interestingly, if you Tweet with your geolocation on Twitter, the location doesn’t seem to show up in TweetDeck, Seesmic or presumably other third-party clients. And It doesn’t work from Twitter’s mobile site, at least not on the iPhone, where it would make more sense.

As we wrote in our earlier coverage, the timing of this move by Twitter is purposeful. With the SXSW conference in Austin starting today, the location wars are heating up. Earlier in the week, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, Foursquare, Gowalla and a host of other location-based apps are rolling out additional functionality. As we previously noted, many of these apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.

via feedproxy.google.com

I noticed this yesterday on my Twitter home page. Very cool Twitter! I even had choices to select nearby locations, refresh etc.

Filed under  //   social media   twitter  
Posted March 12, 2010