Brand Your Tweets with Twitter Anywhere

What we’ve seen so far at Twitter @Anywhere is amazing! I’ve seen tonnes of websites implement Twitter functionality to ther websites without any hassle and it also seems to work well! Now that the documentation is being arranged, everything seems clear enough, this is yet another way of branded tweeting!

Branded tweeting? Huh? Well, this is a topic covered quite sime time ago, when companies (and individuals) wrote specific Twitter clients via the available OAuth libraries, that would send out tweets marked “via application”, where “application” could be the name of the company, linking to their website.

Such applications were standalone (Visual Basic, C#, etc) or web-based (perl, php), and some of them were not only meant to tweet, but sometimes looked like a full-feature Twitter client. But, the time has changed.

In order to brand the tweets, all you have to do now is register your application to use OAuth at dev.twitter.com and copy-paste an @anywhere snippet called tweetbox, somewhere on your website. It could also be a private area (or even a local html page), doesn’t matter.

The engineers at Twitter have worked out all the OAuth routine for you, and what you’re left with is an awesome tweet box, just like on twitter.com, through which tweets will be sent out “branded”, i.e. containing your application name in the “via …” clause.

This is certainly easier than how we had to do it earlier, and I’m expecting a huge impact on the Twitter clients list, which will increase dramatically, as more and more companies and individuals would like to see their names in the client section of every tweet. Of course this move is quite serious, as it may destroy some of the statistics that Twitter gather, where “web” used to take the lead.

Of course the @anywhere tweetbox is not a fully-functional Twitter client and we’d still like to use TweetDeck, Seesmic and other major ones for our convenience. Then again, what if the major ones start offering (perhaps not for free) branded tweeting themselves? I think that would be against their company policy and would result in a total mess ;)

P.S. You can now chirp me, which took me a few minutes to build with Twitter @Anywhere.

Cheers!