Twitter Announces NEW @AnyWhere Platform to Launch on eBay!

Today during his talk at South by Southwest (SXSW) Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced the new @Anywhere platform for Twitter. Williams company pulled in more than $25 million last year with partnership with Google and Microsoft. Twitter has been the darling of the news and social networkers for the past year and a personal favorite of mine too.

Williams said he wants to help lower the barriers to adoption and now users can follow content from site providers without exiting their site. He said this will help sites gain more followers and have your fans on Twitter talk more about your content.

As you know I am a HUGH follower of all things social networking for business, I am going to be all over this stuff and hope to have more information as it develops. Until then, below is the blog post from Evan on the Twitter blog in full…

When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of 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. 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.

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.