Rumor had it that Twitter was going to unveil its advertising strategy and platform at cofounder Ev Williams’ keynote yesterday at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. Wrong! Instead, Williams announced something called @anywhere. The Twitter blog post on @anywhere isn’t terribly explicit about what it is, but it’s at least a rough equivalent of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect — a way for third-party sites to hook themselves into Twitter so that folks’ Twitter identities follow them across the Web.

@anywhere disperses the Twitter experience via Hovercards — the mini user profiles that pop up on Twitter itself — and site proprietors will be able to add it easily via JavaScript rather than through a more complex API. Williams didn’t mention when it would debut, but the blog post says “soon” and lists some impressive launch partners: Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

More on this as Twitter discloses more details. I’m intrigued, at least — both as a Twitter user and as a publisher who might be interested in adding @anywhere to my site…

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