Twitter has developed a button that Web publishers can integrate into their sites to let visitors easily subscribe to Twitter accounts, the company said.
The Follow Button is designed to make it easier for Web publishers to promote their Twitter accounts and will also simplify the process for website visitors to discover and subscribe to Twitter accounts.
Among the first wave of sites using the Follow Button are AOL, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, MTV and Sports Illustrated.
Twitter also offers Web publishers the Tweet Button, which lets visitors share and “retweet” links on Twitter right from the site they’re visiting.
The functionality in the Follow and Tweet buttons is reminiscent of the company’s initial description of @anywhere, a developer platform Twitter unveiled in March of last year. It was designed to enable developers to integrate Twitter data and features into their sites without API (application programming interface) calls but rather by pasting a few lines of Javascript code.
“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,” reads the first Twitter blog post about @anywhere.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.