Twitter finally decided to generate some moolah this afternoon with the unveiling of @anywhere. CEO Evan Williams revealed the newest platform in social networking at the South by Southwest conference (SxSW if you’re limited to 140 characters). The details are relatively fuzzy, but it sounds like Twitter is planning to charge participating sites for access to the interactive feature.
During the SxSW announcement, a post went up on the Twitter blog, explaining the new framework as a way for Twitter users to connect to their accounts directly from the participating sites. According to the blog, the platform will allow users 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—and that’s just the beginning.”
And even more exciting is you can help! @anywhere’s second post (via the iPhone app Echofon — was someone tweeting during the announcement?) reads: “If you’re a javascript guru and want to help us build @anywhere and work with publishers @jointheflock.” And with over 3,000 followers already, someone will probably answer the call.
Though the new framework continues to suggest that networking can be profitable, Twitter isn’t really that dollar-hungry compared to other social media sites. At least Twitter isn’t profiting directly from users — unlike Myspace, which recently decided to sell user information, including playlists, photos and zipcodes, to online marketplace InfoChimps. Then again, who really wants to know that you still like Enya?