Twitter @anywhere: Taking On Facebook Connect

Somewhere in the debris of the past few weeks, I probably read something about the Twitter @anywhere announcement, but I can’t recall it. I know I read about Ev Williams’ dismal SxSW keynote, but the details slipped out of my head.

Now that I have resurfaced, I took a look at what has been said, and it’s clear that Twitter has decided to take aim at Facebook Connect:

via Twitter blog, @anywhere

Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Nick O’Neill sees the same encroachment by Facebook into the open social arena that Twitter typifies, and likewise equates this announcement by Twitter as a strategic move to counter Facebook Connect’s established presence in media:

Nick O’Neill, Twitter Forces Facebook To Open Up Beyond “Friends”

With numerous product upgrades and new services launching at Facebook’s developer event, f8, next month, it’s increasingly clear that Facebook is focused on one key goal: becoming the center of a user’s identity. Last week’s @anywhere announcement by Twitter, which is intended to be a competitor to Facebook Connect, fortunately got miscommunicated through a poor keynote interview.

It’s clear though that the social media race is not just about aggregating information about users, but becoming the center of their identity. Facebook is doing an excellent job at this but in order to continue, they’ll need to be as open as Twitter in order to enable strangers to connect. One example of a feature not currently duplicated but critical for increasing engagement on Facebook is Twitter’s “trending topics”. How Facebook accomplishes this task will be extremely challenging as they need to balance user privacy demands while simultaneously making more information public, whether users like it or not.

While Facebook needs to recruit developers the greater challenge for Facebook will be maintaining users’ trust in what is becoming a more transparent world. While Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook claim that it’s “the way the world is going”, overstepping the boundaries of users could have significant repercussions.

For now Facebook will continue to make a significant push forward down the tightrope which divides developer desires and user needs. Whether or not they succeed is unknown but it’s clear that the opening up of user information is happening rapidly.

Zuckerberg is rapidly turning Facebook into a much more Twitter-like experience, which requires that he dismantle the social contract he first built with users: that Facebook was about connecting with people you actually know, and hang out with. He wants to make Facebook an open social experience, specifically, because that what a sizable portion of users want, and what all companies and media outlets need.

Whether he can pull off that transition remains to be seen. And in the meantime, Twitter’s @anywhere is much more attractive to media companies that are already Twitter-happy. And the ‘opening up of user information’ — the emergence of publicy in the social web and the erosion of privacy — positions Twitter as the leading network in the open stream that the web is rapidly becoming.

Update on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 11:13AM by Stowe Boyd  

Umair Haque dissects his interview with Ev Williams from SxSW. The skinny? Williams is focused on principles, not product; building a business that is a force for good in the world.