Twitter on Monday began letting its hot microblogging service be integrated into Web sites such as YouTube and Microsoft’s Bing with a new “@Anywhere” feature.
“This is not an ad platform, it is an ‘at’ platform,” Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said while announcing @Anywhere during an on-stage chat at a South By South West Interactive gathering in Austin.
“It should result in more followers for a site and more fans talking on Twitter,” Williams said.
The feature lets Web sites have Twitter dialogue boxes pop-up on-screen so visitors can fire off or read messages without having to go to the microblogging service’s Web site.
@Anywhere also allows for names on Web pages to be highlighted and used to link to an individual’s Twitter stream.
Bing, YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo were among the major Web properties that integrated Twitter in time for the @Anywhere launch, Twitter said.
“We’re excited to support @Anywhere, allowing our users to authorize Twitter data sharing with their Yahoo ID in a way that empowers them to consume their Twitter feeds on Yahoo and to share Yahoo content to Twitter,” Yahoo executive Cody Simms said in a release.
@Anywhere is free for publishers interested in weaving Twitter into their Web sites, the San Francisco-based firm said.
“Hopefully, they will embrace the new platform and see it as a way to integrate Twitter and disseminate what is good,” Williams said of online news services and other Web sites that thrive on providing fresh information.
“If they are breaking news it is going to spread faster on Twitter and they are adding value,” he said.
Separately, Twitter said it was working on a way to allow Chinese users to sign up to the site in their own language, a co-founder of the site said on Monday night, but access to the popular site remains blocked in that country.
Jack Dorsey said at a panel that Twitter is “hard at work” on allowing users to register in Chinese. Dorsey was responding to a question from Chinese avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei (艾未未).
Dorsey, Ai and Richard MacManus, founder of technology blog ReadWriteWeb, were part of a discussion on digital activism at the Paley Center for Media.
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