In what was first viewed as a breakthrough moment in tech, then almost instantaneously derided as a yawn-fest, Twitter’s Chief Executive Evan Williams, unveiled an unexpected, yet virtually extensible marketing platform @anywhere. A tool aimed squarely at placing the Twitter ecosystem in a more contextual environment—right at the source for most discussion on the Internet—original content sites. Most users on the service were up in arms at the less-than stimulating presentation, however, now that the dust has settled I think it’s time to take a more holistic view of @anywhere’s relevance. At its core it’s more of a robust, contextual, directory service. After all, it’s become nearly impossible to sift through all the noise on Twitter to find the relevant commentary and content most casual users are after. The only relevant method in the past was to stumble upon a breadcrumb somewhere in the social void.
My prediction is that there is much more to come for this type of “ionospheric” implementation of the Twitter platform. Ideally Twitter will become the de-facto standard for sending a “personal” note to anyone, anywhere. Users can easily and actively vet incoming communications in a separate space from their traditional, and practically sacred, inboxes.
@anywhere will push relevant users to the forefront and allow Twitter accounts to become a more mainstream tool for interpersonal communication. Judging by the early screenshots, I’d say the Twitter team is still catering to power-users and not doing enough to make the service accessible to the masses. Case-in-point—to re-tweet, reply, or view a users profile page they seem to only use icons. While this is accepted iconography within the Twitter community, it will not open up the platform to casual observers—an absolute must if they continue to organically grow their user-base.
The bigger-picture implications of @anywhere come in the simple fact that the future of communication will come not from impersonal phone numbers, but from personalized “usernames” that will make exchanging quick messages with friends seem like a world away from the numerical strings that made up the majority of email addresses until the launch of the mainstream version of AOL in the early ‘90s. Instead of limiting ourselves to simple text transactions, I can see the Twitter ecosystem opening up to include a wide-swath of communications options—voice and long-form messaging, along with the short bursts of text we’re currently using it for.
It could become a switchboard for the modern era, nicely sidestepping and/or complementing everything Google has rolled out over the past six months.
As soon as we get our hands on the platform we’ll be able to post a more robust commentary on whether the future value of this tool is in the sheer number of sites its placed within (a potential advertising platform), or whether it serves as a launchpad for future structural changes for the service (communications switchboard).
