@advertising er… I mean @anywhere

Hey everyone, stop what you are doing and listen….Twitter is going to announce how it plans to handle its new advertising platform! Wait, what? Not advertising but @anywhere? Who messed that up and how? Ok fine, so all the excitement about advertising on Twitter has now overshadowed their big announcement about @anywhere.  One quick thing…..@ev, perhaps you may have wanted to correct those who were creating false buzz about the advertising bit so that the @anywhere announcement was received with a bit more excitement. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you were too busy to deal with it or too nice to tell the rumor mill to shut up.

That aside, the @anywhere feature is really very cool.  So, the idea is that when you are on a site (not Twitter)  you can follow the people/person that are involved with that site, right from that site. So, if you scroll down you’ll see my bio and instead of clicking through to Twitter and then following me, you could, some day, follow me right from this site. (You know you want to follow me…please follow me J )The other neat part of this is the “Hover Card”, let’s say I am talking about ABC Company and you want to know more about them on Twitter. You could hover over their name and get their Twitter information i.e. website address, Bio, and most recent tweet, plus you can opt to follow that company right from the hover card.

@Anywhere is not going to be available on all sites just yet, they are starting with just a few like Amazon, AdAge,  Bing, The New York Times, and others. It will be easy to implement with just adding a few lines of javascript to your current website, so I am looking forward to when the open this service up to all of us. (@ev, we will all get this service soon, right? Please??)

What is so great about this is its complete simplicity.  When you find someone whom you find interesting you just click and follow. It’s so simple and at the same time, fantastic….just like Twitter!