By now, I think we’ve all heard of Facebook Connect, Facebook’s interesting way to integrate logins and notifications into any web site across the Web. Now, Twitter is introducing something similar, @anywhere. They are rolling out with some high-profile partners such as YouTube, Salesforce.com, and Amazon.com. Twitter has reached a size and scale, and they have created a somewhat-peaceful coexistence with Facebook. Considering Facebook’s size, this is quite an achievement. The system that many people referred to as “strange” or “peculiar” only a few years ago is now a 140-character marketing communications juggernaut. They are (assuming they can turn a profit someday) the greatest single example I can think of to represent the potential of an entrepreneurial business with extreme focus on a very simple idea.
You shouldn’t wait for Twitter to release their platform to use technology like this. You should use this widget (currently code-named “PageTweets”) today, if getting on Twitter quickly is a priority (it is also available on WidgetBox)!
This development is of particular interest to me because of my experience at (now defunct) Ringside Networks, where we built a social software platform that was compatible with the Facebook API. Along with my knowledge of Status.net (an Open Source Twitter-like status service, originally called Identi.ca), my experience at Ringside Networks gives me a certain perspective. To make it easier for people to “get on” Twitter, I built a widget that makes it easy to, as Twitter says in their @anywhere announcement, “tweet about a video without leaving YouTube” (or, more specifically, the equivalent for your web site). One thing that occurred to me while building my Twitter Widget is that it would be nice to be able to connect to different systems, such as those that use Status.net. Thankfully, Status.net does have some support for the Twitter API, and it should be possible to offer such a widget, if the need should arise. The current widget uses all the fancy stuff that Twitter has to offer, such as OAuth authentication (so I don’t need to collect Twitter usernames and passwords; who wants that kind of responsibility?), and it takes literally one step to deploy.
I am so excited that Twitter is opening up even more and making it easier for folks like me to develop more interesting, easy-to-use solutions for getting people involved in the social web!
