Twitter takes you everywhere online via @anywhere

Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams announced the new Web integration tool for embedding Twitter’s functionality into the rest of the Web at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas.

Twitter to integrate into other Web sites
Called @anywhere, the new service will allow Twitter users to send and receive its short messages while they are browsing other Web sites.

During the presentation at the conference, Williams told the crowd that @anywhere is aimed at making it easier for the third-party Web sites to tap into the flood of tweets posted by its millions of users.

For example, Twitter users will be able to connect to their Twitter accounts through the partner Web sites such as The New York Times and eBay.

In the same way Facebook Connect allows Facebook users to log into other Web sites using their Facebook accounts and interact with their Facebook connections on those sites.

With the launch of @anywhere, Twitter will likely give stringent competition to social networking site Facebook

“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,” Twitter said on its blog.

"With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting," wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in the official blog post.

How it works?
@anywhere consists of a few lines of javascript that can be dropped into any Web page to implement the new @anywhere service that will enable tweets to be sent via an existing account.

When users browse a site that implements @anywhere, people and brands with Twitter accounts will appear as hyperlinks on the Web page of that particular site.

Hovering over the hyperlink a box will appear with that person or brand's Twitter info and most recent Tweet. Clicking on the hyperlink, it will direct the user to their Twitter profile.

“The big thing @anywhere does is reduce friction,” Williams said. “You could be reading your favorite columnist…. Like most things we build with Twitter, we leave a lot of the innovation up to developers and third-parties … but some of the obvious things are you can easily tweet from the column itself if you want to tell people about it, and you may just want to follow the columnist … without going back to Twitter, straight from the byline.”

There's no word as to when the service will go live, but the big-name partners involved in @anywhere include Amazon.com, Microsoft's Bing, eBay, The New York Times, Yahoo, Salesforce.com and Google's YouTube, Advertising Age, IAC/InterActive Corp's Citysearch, The Huffington Post, Digg, Meebo and MSNBC.com.

@anywhere -Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect
With the launch of @anywhere, Twitter will likely give stringent competition to social networking site Facebook, which currently has more than 400 million users.

In Dec.(09), the micro-blogging Web site has announced its buyout of the location tracking start-up Mixer Labs to enhance company’s geolocation services provided on its messaging service.

Twitter also launched its Local Trends feature in January, intended to help users find tweets related to specific areas.

About Twitter
Created by Jack Dorsey, Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular Web sites worldwide according to Alexa’s web traffic analysis (a subsidiary of Amazon.com).

Often called the “Sms of the Internet”, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to stay connected with their friends, family, and co–workers. The service enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets.

Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them.

The site is also used as a means to campaign, educate, and improve public relations across the world.

An estimated 58 million people around the world use Twitter.