Twitter announces @anywhere: expanding tweets to more sites

Twitter is expanding its integration tentacles by breaking ties with the APIs that developers have been using to incorporate the short messages into other sites and platforms.

Today, at the SXSW conference in Austin, Twitter announced @anywhere, a coming-soon feature that will allow site owners to drop integrate Twitter by dropping in a few lines of javascript, rather than implement Twitter's APIs. In a blog post announcing the feature, Twitter writes:

Imagine being able 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. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

A handful of sites will launch when Twitter flips the switch, though it didn't say when that might be. Weeks? Months? The blog post by co-founder Biz Stone only used words like "soon" and phrases like "when we're ready to launch."

Upon launch, however, sites participating in @anywhere will be Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.