The Details On Twitter’s @Anywhere Platform [Screenshots]

@Anywhere is now live, and you can access its documentation and get started here.

We first heard about @Anywhere at SXSWi interactive, during that famously bad keynote and interview from @Ev. Today, at the Chirp conference, we got more details.

@Anywhere is a system to deeply embed Twitter into a website. Many websites already have Twitter integration, but this is the next step, powered by the company itself. Why integrate Twitter into a website? To lower the effort needed to interact with Twitter, and with the website on Twitter.

Publishers are keen to get more shares and retweets, and Twitter wants more active users, so it works both ways. Like many other integration tools, it only requires a few short lines of Javascript to get started.

The @Anywhere feature has four main areas of capability:  Hovercards, Connect, Sign-In, and the Tweetbox. Of course, @Anywhere works with your current Twitter account and social graph, you do not need to build a new network. The Tweetbox is where tweets themselves are displayed, it’s like a short Twitter feed.

The goal is to bring web-interface functionality with targeted tweets and users about specific websites, on those websites.

The obvious parallel here is Facebook connect, which is going to be a head-to-head competitor with @Anywhere. Or perhaps not, if we see publishers and websites adopting both systems.

You should soon be able to “follow a New York Times journalist from her byline,” an upgrade if you are a fan of Twitter. If not, this is just going to annoy you with more website clutter. With the @anywhere platform, people are going to be pushing their writers more often, and in more noticeable ways.

Who is going to be rolling this out? AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Disqus, eBay, Foursquare, Gawker, Google, Gowalla, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Hunch, Mashable, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, WSJ.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube, according to Twitter.

Below is a screenshot of the feature on the @GuardianTech website, with a hovercard in full view:

Next up, tweeting from the website: