@anywhere Launches – LiveIntent Applauds

If you didn’t see Ev William’s keynote from SXSW yesterday, we recommend you Google it. Or, since we do focus on discovery here at LiveIntent, we’ll lend a hand and point you to their blog post here as well as the live-blogging here and TechCrunch’s writeup here. While the whole speech was interesting, the part that really excited us was the announcement of Twitter’s new feature: @anywhere.

@anywhere does what we’ve been advocating for a long time—it brings Twitter out of the apps and puts it on publisher pages where you, as a user, find it most helpful and interesting. The team at LiveIntent is excited about this not only because it means that what we’ve been saying resonates with a larger audience, but also because @anywhere sets the stage for us to introduce the really innovative parts of our technology.

@anywhere promises to be an amazing tool for publishers and we're excited that Twitter is pursuing it. Publishers have always loved Twitter for the followers, page views, and ad impressions that it generates, but now they can promote their Twitter presence without sending users away from their site—a serious drawback in Twitter's previous model.

However, we at LiveIntent think that there’s an opportunity to do more than merely introduce site visitors to writers and editors. We're focusing on moving past 1-to-1 introductions and taking things to the next level: providing cutting edge algorithmic introductions through geo-targeting, user-contributions, and semantic page analysis to help users follow the best content producers. What does that all mean? Basically, that we are going to continue leading the pack by helping users find and follow not just any Twitter accounts, but the best accounts with the highest levels of user-specific engagement, such as subject matter experts and relevant brands.

How do we do this? Well, first of all, unlike Twitter, LiveIntent is free to connect users with the best content creators wherever they're found—Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, anywhere, coming soon! We believe Twitter is an amazing platform, but publishers have great content everywhere and our goal is to help users find and follow the content creators, no matter where they are.

Moreover, our introductions are “intelligent”. By tracking anonymous data across social media, we learn which accounts are most helpful to users. We then apply our proven prediction algorithms, some geo-targeting, user recommendations, and a touch of semantics to match those same high-quality introductions to the content creators of the website you’re on. How can you beat that?

All of this is a long way of saying that we applaud Twitter for taking this step in the right direction. After all, the more publishers who begin using @anywhere to create interesting content, the more high-quality Twitter accounts we’ll have to recommend!