Last night Twitter’s founder Evan Williams announced that Twitter will launch a new “set of frameworks” called @anywhere. These frameworks will operate similar to Facebook Connect it seems, in that you will be able to use your Twitter account to send messages from any enabled webpage, not just from the Twitter website.
On the Twitter blog Biz explains ”web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting”, and “sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors”.
For a large part of the Twitter community, this will be unremarkable. Twitter’s appeal has been its open APIs, which mean mobile apps and partner sites can send tweets with your permission. By embedding Twitter into other websites (and these are major websites with millions of visitors) the messaging platform can reach the valuable mainstream audience and increase the volume of tweets people send because it’s as easy as a single click, rather than visiting a separate web site.
This will inevitably make Twitter more noisy too. If sites go down the ‘one-click tweet’ route, to recommend a product or comment on a news article, the content will largely be pre-written by the site, so branding and commercial messages are going to increase. Think of the official implementation of Retweet by Twitter, which added better measurement but at the expense of being able to edit the content and personalise your tweet.
So we’ll be watching closely how @anywhere develops and how retailers pick up on it. We expect to see some innovative uses but also an increase in less-personal, commercial messages.
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