• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 15, 2010

Twitter CEO Evan Williams showed off new technology Monday that lets content partners cleanly pull Twitter links and streams onto their Web site through JavaScript, instead of an API, but kept hush on advertising plans.

Demonstrating the @AnyWhere platform at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, the technology allows partners to stream tweets onto their Web site, mouse over content that pulls up a "hover card" for more information, and connect with those who tweet to read and respond to posts with one click.

When the service launches with Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Salesforce, YouTube, Yahoo and a handful of media sites, people will have an option to follow tweets without leaving the Web site. But the fact that Williams didn't estimate a time the service would launch left some wondering whether the launch partners lagged in the ability to go live with the service.

Some features demonstrated by Williams at SXSW already exist. The National Hockey League (NHL) has been using a similar technology for months. In fact, the league attributes the technology to keeping fans glued to its site during the recent NHL draft picks.

Twitter investor Jeff Pulver told MediaPost Saturday that Twitter has enabled brands to generate billions of dollars in advertising through a fundamental technology, the real-time Web. "There's no need for Twitter itself to participate in advertising," says Pulver, who cofounded the Internet phone service Vonage and created the 140 Characters Conference.

Leveraging Twitter's brand name appears to be the one most important feature other companies cannot do. And Twitter intends to make integration easier. "Twitter will have the weight of its name behind the features," says Forrester Research Social Media Analyst Augie Ray. "In the long run, Twitter could challenge business models as it continues to develop services."

Ray doesn't see an immediate revenue-generating model in Twitter's @AnyWhere, but says the hover card feature has the potential to include an ad and link to a company's Web site, similar to in-text ads. It doesn't seem like Twitter's intent, he says. The company, rather, continues to show interest in more people using the platform and becoming that central spot for real-time information and sharing --then finding ways to generate revenue from that, similar to the deals with Google and Microsoft Bing.

Many people expected Twitter to announce an ad model at SXSW after Seth Goldstein, chief executive officer and co-founder of socialmedia.com, told attendees at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2010 in Carlsbad, Calif. in late February that the launch would come within the month.

"Twitter will figure out their source of revenue," Ray says. "The search engine deals with Google, Yahoo and Bing were one way to generate revenue, and then there has been some discussion of commercial accounts with more functions and data."