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).

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Mike and I are proud to announce that two of the panels crafted in-house at Carrot have been selected for further voting by you, the lovely interactive community. With your help we can collect all the gold rings, green mushrooms, fire spitting flowers, and flying feather things to defeat Bowser and deliver two riveting presentations in Austin.

Mike will be speaking on how the reigning sports leagues like the MLB, NFL, and NBA can help their athletes leverage social media to connect with their fans on a more direct level. He’ll also touch upon our own client experiences with some of the most influential athletes to play the game, in addition to the controversy surrounding fake athlete accounts, and how they can lead to far-reaching a PR nightmare if left to an amateur.

Myself, PepsiCo’s Director of Digital and Social Media, Bonin Bough, and Josh Karpf, Social Media Manager at PepsiCo, will be speaking on how large corporations can reach an entire new generation of digital consumers by embracing their social consumption behaviors and facilitating genuine communication through a brand’s core messages.

Help us beat Bowser—it’ll not only be a victory for Mario fans worldwide, but also for every one of us who live, eat, and breathe social media.

This article is copyright © 2012