Yesterday, Twitter CEO Evan Williams gave his highly anticipated keynote address for the interactive conference at this year’s South-by-Southwest festival.
Much of the preceding buzz surrounded the possible announcement of a revenue-generating advertising platform for the popular micro-blogging site, but that never materialized.
Instead, Williams announced a new service called @anywhere, allowing users to use Twitter through other websites, similar to Facebook’s Facebook Connect. Initial partners in @anywhere include the New York Times, Bing, Advertising Age and The Huffington Post.
General reaction to the keynote was tepid at best, but most of the tech world’s ire was reserved for the subsequent Q&A with Williams conducted by the Harvard Business Review‘s Umair Haque.
Here’s some of the chatter about the keynote:
Caroline McCarthy, CNET News’ The Social )
The Twitter CEO was sketchy about the details of how @Anywhere will make money, though there are some guesses that big partners will have to pay up for access to the “firehose,” much like its search deals with Twitter and Bing that were announced late last year. Williams described those as “a couple of the first guys that we shared our full stream of public Twitter data with.”
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired.com’s Epicenter
Ironically, Williams’ keynote was widely panned on Twitter. Many commenters reserved especially harsh criticisms for Williams’ onstage interlocutor, Umair Haque.
“This is super painful. Feel a bit bad for @ev. a different format would have been more engaging,” tweeted ramdac. “We wanted to hear Ev speak. Not the guy that loved to hear himself speak.”
In response to the complaints, Williams took the opportunity to use Twitter to solicit “tougher questions” after the keynote wrapped up.
Michelle Kung, Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy
Bored audience members–many of whom started lining up for the initially SRO event an hour before it started–began shuffling out of Exhibition Hall A after the first 15 minutes, with a mass exodus of bodies (and mobile devices) soon to follow. Several tech blogs, including TechCrunch immediately started compiling a list of the best tweets, which ranged from the factual (“The guy behind us is snoring”) to the snarky (“Notorious fluff-slinger Umair Haque seems to be more interested in hearing himself speak than asking @ev meaty Q’s”).
Peter Kafka, Media Memo on All Things Digital
Twitter CEO Evan Williams did not announce the new ad platform the company is working on today.
So when will we see it? Think mid-April.
One good bet is at Chirp, the company’s developer conference four weeks from now. That would make sense because the search ad strategy Twitter is working on–a play on Google’s (GOOG) AdWords/AdSense model–is very much tethered to the third-party software and services that distribute the Twitterstream… Another educated guess: Trade magazine Advertising Age is hosting its Digital Conference in New York on April 13 and 14–just before the Chirp conference. I’ve talked to two sources familiar with the company who expect the announcement to come during that event.
