Twitter kills off @Anywhere

After announcing a tool yesterday to embed interactive timelines of tweets as part of its Twitter for Websites family, Twitter today announced that it is killing off @Anywhere. The company is “sunsetting” the service as it focuses on further building out Twitter for Websites. The death date is December 6, 2012.

If you’re currently using @Anywhere, the company’s first solution for bringing “the Twitter communication platform” to your site, the social network wants you to switch to Twitter for Websites. To do that, you can add Follow buttons and Tweet buttons, linkify @usernames with Twitter Web Intents, and Sign-in with Twitter. Yes, there’s quite a few options, and I personally recommend that you don’t just go in and use all of them. There is such a thing as overkill.

There is one piece of functionality that Twitter does not currently replicate, and has no plans to: Hovercard. The company says it hasn’t hovercards “deliver the value to users we hoped for.” As a result, Twitter is pointing to its Mini-Profile Twitter Web Intent, which requires a clickthrough but “offers a richer set of information for a specific user, including the display of a small subset of their most recent Tweets.” So, hovercards are dead, and there’s no real alternative, for now.

The @Anywhere platform was first announced in March 2010. The service let you add a link to any word and have that launch a hovercard that in turned allowed you to follow the person right there and then.

Oh, one last thing. The @Anywhere Twitter account is now essentially useless, as it just announced:

Sunsetting myself: dev.twitter.com/blog/sunsettin…

— Anywhere (@anywhere) September 6, 2012

Developers have three months to implement the alternatives to @Anywhere. If you have questions or concerns, Twitter is taking your comments here: @Anywhere Sunset – Feedback.

Read also: Twitter releases API V1.1, says 100K user token limit applies only to a small set of clients

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