Dave Winer on Twitter's new @anywhere identity system extension

“Dave Winer on Twitter’s new @anywhere identity system extension. What is @anywhere? Here’s my best guess…”

@Anywhere was a new feature announced by Twitter that allows websites to integrate Twitter functionality, such as displaying user profiles and enabling commenting, without users having to leave the website. This is Twitter’s answer to similar features offered by Facebook, where users can use their Facebook login to interact on other websites. Dave suggests that @Anywhere appears to be part of a broader trend of technology companies trying to extend their reach and integrate their services across the web, though the long-term impact and usefulness of such features remains to be seen.

Hey everybody, it’s Dave Winer here and I was just reading an article on GigaOm by Matthew In gram.
And he said there’s a little bit of confusion about what this @Anywhere thing is that Twitter announced yesterday.
I’m not sure that Ingram is really confused. It was a pretty boxed announcement.
But I can explain what it is and maybe even provide a little context on it.
It’s an answer to something that Facebook has been doing.
And it’s also another one of these sort of salvos in what you might call the identity wars.
It’s basically you’ve got a lot of different competing identity systems on the net these days.
Always have had a bunch of them . Gmail is an identity system.
Or Google’s login is an identity system. They played a bit of identity system warfare with the whole Google Buzz thing and connecting it up with Gmail saying, “Well, we’ve got a lot of users here. Why don’t we turn them all into users of a new social network?” Community discussion thing. It didn’t go over very well.
So you can think of all of these things as sort of repurp osing identity, trying to get people to think of their identity with one company as being more than just an identity with that one company.
So on Facebook, I think it’s called Facebook Connect where you can use your Facebook blog to log in to blogs and stuff like that so you can comment there without having to create another username and password.
Kind of pointless actually.
Well, maybe not pointless because all the comments that you leave are then part of the comment stream that your updates, your status stream, or whatever you call it over on Facebook.
So there’s a little bit of integration there that maybe people like.
I’m not a big Facebook user, so to me it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
So what Twitter noticed, presumably, is that they’ve got a lot of reporters that use Twitter.
And it’s true, they do. And so if you notice that when you go to read an article on The New York Times or The Huffington Post or any number of different places, that they provide a way to contact the author of the article.
And so what they’re saying here is, well, the email address would be sort of like the default way to contact the author.
And they’re saying basically, well, you know, your Twitter ID is pretty important too.
And so why don’t we just make it easy for these publications to link from the author of the article to their Twitter identity. And so that when you hover over their name, you get the same pop-up that you get over on Twitter, which honestly I didn’t think was all that innovative.
Frankly, I think it took features out of Twitter. In fact, in a piece I wrote yesterday, I even think in some ways that it broke Twitter, because clicking on a user’s name in Twitter actually got you some important stuff. You know, you might argue a number of followers, that isn’t so important, and the number of people that they follow.
Okay, well, it is kind of important actually. But I can understand them wanting to de- emphasize that.
And certainly the pop-up does do that. But it also makes it very difficult, I’ve found, at least using Firefox, to find the tweet stream from that author.
And with 140 character messages , people tend to connect their messages.
The last message is an extension, or it assumes that you’ve read the previous one.
There’s so much confusion when you do that, it’s bad enough that people don’t click on it.
Now they’ll never get there. So you end up having to repeat yourself for the last one choice, or just never stringing things together. So forget about ever explaining anything that might require a little bit more than 140 characters. That becomes more and more unlikely over time.
So I guess the question is, is the Twitter identity really the important information about an author? I don’t think it really is. And I think that the owners of these sites will not simply link to the Twitter identity.
They’ll probably include that amongst the many different ways of accessing the author of an article.
So is it a big deal? Sure, if you’re following the vendor sports, and you’re interested in who’s kicking who’s ass over there in Silicon Valley, in that context it’s important.
It’s also more an example of really how convoluted this whole mess is.
You’ve got these companies, technology companies out there, getting more and more insidious .
It means getting inside of something, getting into places where they really don’t belong.
Why does Twitter belong on Huff ington Post? I don’t get it. Do they really think that goes anywhere? In their boardrooms over Twitter, in the boardroom of Twitter when they have the discussion about this, they’re thinking long-term multi-step strategy, they want to sort of extend their reach out further and further and further.
But, you know, there’s another school of thought that says, we ’ll look back on this as being ridiculous five years from now, a little bit long forgotten, only mentioned in the context of some other megalomaniac region, some technology company .
I don’t think this is one we need to worry about, in other words.
But, if you’re a worrying sort of person and you’re in the media, this is another reason to think about, maybe you want to get your own real-time news system out there , or work with some of your competitors to get one out there, because the tech industry is really, some of these days you ’re going to figure this out.
There are ways to do this, what they’re trying to do, that will work. And this, I don’t think is one of them.
But, anyway, those are my thoughts about anywhere. I hope you’re all having what is today . Great Tuesday.
It’s beautiful here in New York today. The rainy weather seems to finally be over.
It’s a sunny day. It’s a little bit brisk outside. It’s probably the high 40s, maybe low 50s right now.
It’s going to head up toward 60 later today. So, I think you can fairly say spring is here on the East Coast.
And, I hope you’re having a great Tuesday. See you all soon . Bye.