Twitter Launching @anywhere; Plans to be @everywhere!
Twitter is not content to occupy those little moments you share together when the boss is not looking. It’s not willing to put up with being used merely as a channel to share what you ate for breakfast!
Nope, Twitter wants to be @anywhere and @everywhere.
OK, so officially it just wants to be @anywhere–the name of its new framework–but you’ll soon see Twitter’s real plans are to be everywhere on the web.
According to co-founder Biz Stone you’ll be 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.
Yay, more noise! Ahem, I mean, valuable content being distributed throughout the web.
While @anywhere is not live yet, Twitter has an impressive line-up of sites that have agreed to participate, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.
How will @anywhere work? According to DigitalBeat, those annoying nifty hovercards that Twitter implemented on the web interface will be the carrier for the disease that will infect every web site in the world platform used for @anywhere.
Your 2-cents? Go!
Fuzzy Math Puts Facebook Ahead of Google as Most Visited Site
I really thought this chart from Hitwise (via TechCrunch) was going to be a bigger deal than it actually is.
On the face of it, Facebook just overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S:
However, Google doesn’t get the benefit of traffic to YouTube; and Yahoo is a mere third, because Yahoo Mail or Flickr aren’t credited towards its total.
Considering Facebook does video, images, messaging, it seems this chart has been carefully crafted to create headlines. 
Google: Mobile Query Growth “Dramatically Higher” Than PC
During an investor and financial analyst webcast yesterday Google’s Vic Gundotra said that an “increasingly large” number of advertisers were doing mobile campaigns and that there was a “dramatic amount of interest” in mobile among those not yet advertising in mobile. Much of the webcast was devoted to demonstrating Google mobile products and initiatives and [...]
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Why Is Ask Really Hiding Their Ads Referrer Data
I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Ask Sponsored Listings has changed how they handle sending referrer data to webmasters. From now on, they are basically not sharing the page of origin with the webmaster.
Why? Ask said they have moved to a new system named PureLeads. What is Pureleads? The FAQ [...]
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How To Find The Right People To Follow On Twitter
While many of us in the marketing world tend to focus on how many followers we have and how to get more, for many Twitter users the other side of that coin is a real challenge: How do I find good people to follow on Twitter?
Twitter itself has underscored the challenge as far back [...]
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Elevating The Global Importance Of Content
Shortly after my last Multinational Search post (Global Vs. Local: How To Let Google Know How To Treat Your Site) I was taken to task by a few readers complaining that supposed global experts only talk about domains and hosting for international sites and not enough about content. Ok, fair criticism, that article [...]
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Now Available in Real Time: Spam!
Yep, now you can have spam delivered in real time to your search results on Google or Twitter. This is just why we all clapped for joy when Bing and Google hooked up with Twitter for real time results, isn’t it?
Oh, no? Hm. I guess we’re not the only ones. Search Engine Roundtable noted a Webmaster World forum thread complaining about the spam in real time search results. In the SER poll, 78% (as of the time of this screenshot) felt the real time results in Google are either somewhat or very spammy:
However, this may just be their perceptions: it may be less that the results themselves are spam and more than they’re merely unwanted, and therefore we consider them spam (like commercial emails that we really did sign up for but really don’t want to get anymore—except we didn’t get the choice to sign up for this addition to the SERPs).
Twitter, meanwhile, is doing what it can about spam on its site. The “trust and safety” unit at the company now employs 22 people, making it the largest division at the company. But it’s not just the blatant tag spam and mock-celebrity accounts they’re looking at. According to Ad Age:
The dirty secret of Twitter’s war on spam? A significant amount of it emanates from clumsy marketers that just don’t know any better.
So what do they flag as spam? They have automatic filters to catch accounts that follow a large number of Tweeple, unfollow them all, and then add more followers. (Follower spam.) They also have recently set up technology to filter links and check for phishing attempts. The team also handles hacking attacks and copyright/brand claims.
But even legit accounts can devolve into spammy practices, like keyword-based autoreplies. The rule of thumb? “[E]ngage the people you are trying to sell stuff to. If you are creating a dialogue with people and not just touting things because you want to make a buck, you are going to have a network of people that value your input,” says the trust & safety unit director Del Harvey. She says they’re constantly working on algorithmic improvements to catch more spammers and reduce false positives—sound familiar?
What do you think? Is Twitter doing enough to reduce spam—including the spam that filters into Google search results? Do you think Google’s real time results are spammy—or just unwanted?
Facebook Passes Google (Again) As Most-Visited US Site: Hitwise
Facebook.com was the most-visited web site in the U.S. last week, surpassing even Google.com. And this is not the first time it’s happened.
According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook.com received 7.07% of all internet visits during the week that ended on March 13th, with Google getting 7.03%.
This compares visits between the two home pages — Facebook.com and [...]
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Twitter Announces @Anywhere Platform For Web Sites
You may have caught this in Danny Sullivan’s liveblogging of Ev William’s keynote at SXSW today, but just in case … Twitter has introduced a new platform called @anywhere that will allow web sites to integrate Twitter features more easily.
The details seem a bit foggy to me, but it sounds like @anywhere takes many of [...]
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Live Blogging SXSW: Ev Williams Keynote
Live blogging from SXSW continues, with Twitter cofounder Ev Williams to take the stage shortly. Will he announce Twitter’s rumored ad plans, as expected? Stay tuned for the news.
Umair Haque of Havas Media Lab is doing the interview with Ev. Ev says he wanted to announce his new @anywhere platform, to integrate Twitter [...]
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