SXSW 2010 a bust for Twitter fans

 
Twitter unveils @anywhere, offering almost nothing new and avoiding the news everyone really wanted to hear

South by Southwest has become the launch pad of huge new social media services. Twitter and Foursquare both blew up after taking the city of Austin by storm. So this year, we were expecting some big news from Twitter. In particular, most of us were expecting to finally discover Twitter’s elusive plan on how they’ll monetize the service and make it a sustainable enterprise for the long term future.

But what we got was @anywhere. With @anywhere, you can easily follow people you read about on webpages and share articles or products you find with just a few clicks. You sign into the site you’re visiting with your Twitter ID and can then interact with Twitter without leaving the page. As Twitter CEO Evan Williams said during the unveiling at SXSW, “the big thing @anywhere does is reduce friction.” 

This should all sound very familiar since there were already loads of third party developers reducing the friction of using Twitter to almost zero. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, those “share through Twitter” and “follow me on Twitter” icons have been dotting thousands of websites for a long time and desktop applications have made it easy to share pics and links in a matter of seconds. A lot of people sitting in the packed auditorium durning Williams’ presentation thought it was familiar enough to walk out in the middle of the talk and Guy Kawasaki called out the presentation as “boring” during a later panel discussion. 

@Anywhere’s advantage is that it was created by Twitter itself, and as such may gain traction with more major sites than the third party apps, despite offering pretty much the same thing. And that, in turn, will expose Twitter to many new web surfers and potentially lead to a new surge in its user base. There are 13 heavy hitters partnering with Twitter so far though some, like YouTube, already offered Twitter integration: 

 

The service does add a minor improvement to integrating Twitter into the main content of websites and finding new people to follow you may have overlooked, and it may well lead to new innovations by third party developers who take it and find creative uses. But it’s a lot less than we’ve come to expect from the social media pioneer and leaves us looking toward the Twitter developer conference Chirp for the big news we’ve been waiting for. As there’s a presentation on Monetization scheduled, we’re thinking Chirp will be the big reveal that SXSW 2010 was not.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.