For those of you who don’t know the South by South West (SXSW) conference is a group of festivals focused on film, music and interactive industries and takes place every spring in Austin, TX. Over the years it has become not only a big name for film and music, but the online world as well. In 2007 SXSW was where Twitter founders announced their website (although it launched in July 2006).
Fast forward to the present and there was much talk about what Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO was going to say during his keynote speech this year at SXSW. Many were anticipating him to talk about Twitter’s advertising capabilities—instead he announced @Anywhere.
The basic concept of @Anywhere is when you are browsing the Internet, and you are on a site that has partnered up with Twitter, you will be able to follow any Twitter account that is associated with that site. The benefit here is you won’t be redirected to someone’s Twitter page.
Many details are still a bit blurry, and we won’t get much more information until mid April (the 14th and 15th to be exact) when Twitter holds their Chirp conference. One detail that seems to be across the board is you will be able to follow a journalist from their byline. The sites that have signed up thus far are:
- Amazon
- AdAge
- Bing
- Citysearch
- Digg
- eBay
- The Huffington Post,
- Meebo
- MSNBC.com
- The New York Times
- Salesforce.com
- Yahoo!
- YouTube
What this means for your business
This could “open the door” for even better interaction for your companies blog and social media efforts. It’s one thing to have a “Follow Us on Twitter” button, but to have your readers be able to follow and not navigate away from your content could be huge. Williams put it this way, “@Anywhere taps into Twitter's deepest values of openness and transparency. "A window is transparent, but a door is open," he said. "A door lets people come in and mess with what you're doing."
From a networking and educational stand point of view, being able to easily follow a journalist or blogger you find interesting will be much easier. You could use your Twitter account like an RSS feed, but you will be be able to actively engage with the authors themselves.
We will all learn more in April about @Anywhere, but for now it seems interesting to say the least. @Anywhere still has a lot of mystery to it, but for now it has many social media users wondering what its full capabilities will be.