While its still working out a few post-release kinks in functionality, Twitter’s @anywhere feature is slowly trying to find its place through its “for the tweeters, by the tweeters” approach.
Twitter made it seem visionary in their initial blog posts, but the implementation of the week-old share-anywhere feature has us wondering: where is it? Again this morning there was still no updates on the media.twitter.com bulletin board telling us how companies are using it to innovate their customer’s online experience.

It’s just a little code to slip onto a web page, and yet the handful of hand-picked sites like Amazon.com and The New York Times selected to integrate @anywhere still haven’t actually activated the feature. Who has? Well, Twitter nerds are still trying to figure out how to apply it to other sites and get the “follow” buttons to work (to much frustration) as this Tweeter broadcasts:

“For some reason I haven’t yet managed to tweet or follow via Twitter @Anywhere. Follow button e.g. just disappears.. Alpha version?”

The biggest problem seems to be that no one really knows what to keep an eye out for. How will the @anywhere look on the site? Do I have to click on the Twitter button to activate it? Will it work anything likeFacebook Connect where a very prominent “share” button appears, etc? So far, it isn’t all that obvious to us, and, judging by the early chatter, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of illuminating @anywhere activity. Anywhere.

Its first signs of life may be at The Guardian newspaper’s online UK election coverage. They intend @anywhere to allow readers to tweet directly from The Guardian website to candidates, and then debate with fellow citizens in the friendly British political discourse we are all familiar with. Whether that happens in any meaningful way before the May 6th date at the polls is yet to be seen.

Maybe we’re being impatient. After it gains grounding with some well-read sites we expect the tweeting public to start making some noise and boasting about the cooler implementation of this API. The feature, after all, allows tweeters to tweet wherever their little heart desires without having to return to the twitter server.

Here’s something else we’re keen to watch. Will Facebook Connect  start to feel threatened by the waltz into their now established stomping ground? And what about Meebo’s new come-one-come-all approach to sharing, now starring Google, Microsoft and Yahoo? Facebook and Twitter are conspicuously not sharing in that alliance.

Back to Facebook and Twitter… while Facebook Connect focuses on the individual’s Facebook profile and its immediate friends, Twitter’s @anywhere concentrates on the subject matter and the trending topics. It will be interesting to see where these two application’s founding principles take them on their quest to connect the web.