AUSTIN, Tex. — Twitter is aiming to expand its reach on the Web.
On Monday at the South by Southwest interactive conference here, Evan Williams, the chief executive of Twitter, announced that the company planned to introduce a service called @anywhere. It will allow people to make use of Twitter through other Web sites, similar to the way the Facebook Connect service lets Facebook users take their social network with them elsewhere on the Web.
When the service is introduced, the initial partners will include more than a dozen news sites and start-up companies, including The Huffington Post, Meebo, eBay, Digg and The New York Times Company.
“Say you’re browsing one of your favorite Web sites, such as The Huffington Post, and you see your favorite columnist,” Mr. Williams said. “You can follow them.”
Mr. Williams showed a short video that demonstrated the new features, which will allow Twitter users to send tweets from participating sites. While browsing one of those sites, topics and the names of companies and public figures that have a presence on Twitter will appear as hyperlinks. “The big thing that @anywhere does is reduce friction,” Mr. Williams said. He did not say when the service might go live.
Twitter is a big driver of traffic to news and media sites, Mr. Williams said, and the new features could allow for new relationships between those publishers and audiences.
“Like most things we build with Twitter,” he said, “there’s a lot that can be done that we can’t even anticipate.”