Twitter’s Evan Williams announces @Anywhere feature at SXSW

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Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams at the South by Southwest music festival announced a new feature Monday called @Anywhere to help propagate the popular micro-blogging site even further.

The feature lets sites embed key Twitter features without having to send users off to Twitter’s home page. By hovering the cursor on a name, for instance, viewers can see the person’s Twitter handle and how many people are following them and click a button to follow that person’s Twitter stream -- without having to go to Twitter’s site. To see how a pop-up window could look, check out the screen shot on the left.

With 75 million users sending 50 million tweets a day, Twitter has been seeking ways to let users get more out of Twitter without being bombarded by irrelevant tweets. And though the service is well known among the digitally savvy, Twitter has had less traction among the masses.

With @Anywhere, Twitter hopes to solve both problems at once. The idea is by letting users follow people directly on their websites, Twitter gets more users and the users are more likely to find interesting people to follow.

“What we’re doing is lowering the barriers” to using Twitter, Williams said during his keynote at SXSW. “There’s something interesting on Twitter for everybody. But not everybody knows that.”

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.