I was unable to make it down to SXSW this year which means I’m missing the keynote presentation by Twitter‘s Evan Williams. However, according to a post just made on the Twitter blog, a new Twitter development – called “@anywhere” – is coming soon to a handful of leading web sites including the eBay Marketplace. Something I believe @Ev is talking about right now.

The post:

@anywhere
When we designed Twitter, we took a different approach—we didn’t require a relationship model like that of a social network. Keeping things open meant you could browse our site to read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters, and more. You could follow any account and be followed by any account. As a result, companies started interacting with customers, celebrities connected with fans, governments became more transparent, and people started discovering and sharing information in a new, participatory manner.

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

I’ve been pretty vocal in the past about social media integration on ebay.com. Representing one of the first – if not the first – online social networks, eBay has seen the social web grow and evolve at a rate that, until recently, had made it challenging for the site to maintain pace. Even though it’s a positive start, the ability to share listings via Twitter and Facebook has been a crude but functional feature on the site for just a few months now.

From what I can tell, the news out of Twitter today is very promising for buyers and sellers on the eBay Marketplace. It represents a growing trend we’ve been seeing over the past year that eBay is willing to knock down what had been until recently, indestructible barriers of entry. Something I wrote about last year for the BBC:

Excerpt…

The advent of the social web has built upon that original eBay ideal – connecting people online – creating virtual villages that introduce individuals with similar likes and views to one another, regardless of geography. The ubiquitous aspects of the new social web, although perfectly positioned for the personality of the eBay community, actually currently goes directly against the existing makeup of the eBay Marketplace infrastructure…

…To that end, eBay has taken an open and earnest approach to third-party development on its site through its Selling Manager Applications (SM Apps) program. I believe the company acknowledges that the eBay Marketplace must become more than a sequence of proprietary sites and embrace total ubiquity in order to fully realize its continued vision of connecting buyers and sellers online.

Rather than stand as an eNation, therefore, I would propose it’s more important for eBay to continue its evolution into a confederation of virtual villages allowing its community to use whatever tools necessary to buy and sell what they want, where they want, when they want to.

I still don’t have the details as to how this will be integrated into the marketplace or the extent to which Twitter applications are coming to eBay.com. Huge questions I realize. For now, I can only hope my excitement is justified.

What do you think? Are you an eBay seller or buyer using Twitter? If not, depending on the extent of the integration, would this get you started?

You can follow eBay Ink on Twitter too: @ebayinkblog.

Cheers,
RBH