Sunsetting @Anywhere

Thursday, 6 September 2012

We’ve been growing the family of products that makes up Twitter for Websites, including, for example, yesterday’s launch of the ability to embed timelines on a website. As Twitter for Websites has evolved, it has improved upon many of the features we introduced with @Anywhere: Tweet box, follow, linkify a @username, sign-in, and the hovercard. As a result, we are sunsetting @Anywhere and focusing on continuing to build out Twitter for Websites.

For those using @Anywhere, here’s how to implement @Anywhere’s features with Twitter for Websites:

Follow and Tweet
The Follow button is the best solution for letting users follow an account associated with your website. And the Tweet button is the best way to help users share content from your website. Both the Follow button and Tweet button will generate optimized pop-up flows for users. Twitter takes care of session handling.

Linkify an @username
Twitter Web Intents make it easy to linkify @usernames. Specifically, the Mini-Profile Twitter Web Intent will allow for linking the name of a user to their Twitter account. Like the Tweet button and Follow button, this happens through an optimized pop-up flow rather than taking that user to a new page.

Sign-in
The Tweet button, Follow button, and Twitter Web Intents all take care of session handling, and they’re much easier to implement than @Anywhere. For instance, if you have used @Anywhere to log in a user who then wants to follow an account, then this functionality can be achieved with the the Follow button’s small snippet of code. It’s also worth noting that if you’re looking to leverage a deeper sign-in integration, we have Sign in with Twitter.

Hovercard
The hovercard is the one piece of functionality for which we won’t provide an alternative, as we haven’t seen it deliver the value to users we hoped for. While the Mini-Profile Twitter Web Intent requires a clickthrough, it offers a richer set of information for a specific user, including the display of a small subset of their most recent Tweets.

We will turn off @Anywhere on December 6th, 2012 (Update: The retirement of @Anywhere has been extended to March 2013 and will be turned off along with API v1 at that time). This gives developers three months to implement new solutions. If you have questions or concerns on this process, please share them with us here. We’re committed to building awesome experiences on the web, and we look forward to continue providing easy-to-implement, powerful and potent tools for the web.