Twitter to spread feeds to third-party sites through new At Anywhere content program

Social networking giant Twitter will soon introduce a new service which allows third-party sites to integrate their Twitter feeds, in an attempt to give users access to tweets without the need for visiting a separate site, co-founder Evan Williams has announced.

Williams has also used the opportunity to attack internet censorship, specifically in China, saying that firewalls will not be able to hold back freely available information forever.

During his keynote speech at the South by Southwest Conference in Texas, Williams announced the new “At Anywhere” feature, which will allow websites to integrate Twitter feeds into their home pages.

The idea, which allows users to navigate Twitter content without making them leave their current page, will be dependent on a few lines of code webmasters and developers can slip in to any site, Williams said.

“You can easily tweet from any page that is using this. Also, maybe you want to talk to authors of posts without going to Twitter itself, you can just hover over their name and tweet them. Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch,” he told TechCrunch.

When users browse a site using the “@anywhere” feature, any people and companies mentioned which have Twitter accounts will be highlighted with a link. When the cursor hovers over that link, Twitter information including recent tweets can be shown.

This means Twitter profiles can be viewed without users even having to visit the Twitter.com site. A number of major sites including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Meebo, Amazon and Yahoo will take place in the initial launch within a few months.

“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,” the company wrote on its official blog.

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

Williams said the service will help users access multiple feeds at once, and will help Twitter users with their own feeds.

“A connection to users you didn’t have before – and it keeps people coming back. And it will result in more followers for a site. Also, hopefully more people who are your fans will use Twitter to talk about you or your content. And you can bring in users’ tweets talking about your site.”

“Yes, it’s about creating experience for users and businesses. There is a ton of business use on Twitter today — it’s one of the biggest uses. We want to make that better, easier, faster.”

Williams also took the opportunity to label Twitter as less of a social network and more of an “information network”, and attacked the mentality behind restricting access to content.

“I think there is a parallel between the service and the company — openness is huge… But the internet is a tidal wave that you will not be able to keep out. Like in China, who knows how long those firewalls will hold up, but not forever.”

He also defended Twitter’s refusal to pursue extensive plans for raising revenue, saying none of the proposals being considered so far would provide sustainable growth. This has caused some analysts to speculate that no comprehensive advertising model will be announced at the conference, despite speculation regarding a major ad network launch at the conference.