Thinking about @Anywhere 3 years ago? (@narendra@willsmith@enemykite@Rafer@R)
Seems like @Ev is catching a bit of hell today for his interview at SXSW today not living up to the hype. While I skipped out early from SXSW this year, I did read the transcripts from the interview just now. Reading this reminded me of the panel I did in 2007 at SXSW with Ev called "User generated content and original editorial: friend or foe" (Thanks to Rex, we still have some quotes from that panel). Re-reading the quotes, one of them really stood out to me:
"Williams: You know we don’t make money. We made tools with Blogger. Twitter we haven’t figured out. It’s not our content, it’s their content. We never really have considered ourselves in the editorial business."
This was in response to a question I asked about how Twitter was going to make money now that it was "a year old". Now think about this for a second. It has been three years since that panel and I'd say this response would be the same if I asked Ev this question again. Kind of crazy. More interesting is the focus on building tools for people to build content. I love the singularity in focus.
Over at Whiskey, we've had Twitter posting integrated into our sites for several months now. (Here's an example of how tweeting intermixes with our own site activity: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/snide). So if @anywhere makes this even easier for publishers, I think that is great for users.
But why would Twitter make it easier for you to not come to their site? My guess is that the more hooks they can get into content publishers and their audiences, the richer the data and targeting capabilities they can provide to advertisers who want to reach customers in real time. If you were an @anywhere customer, Twitter could revenue share some great Adsense-style real time ads with you. So, I'd be willing to bet that this is a first step in an realtime ad sense product for content publishers.
