Going nowhere with @anywhere.

2010 June 13 at 15:31 » Tagged as :twitter, unboxing,

When twitter's @anywhere came out many geeks (yours truely included) thought of ways of adding it to their sites and blogs. @anywhere has a lot of usefull features, then again some it isn't very usefull either (unless of course you are building a fully featured twitter app (which most website owners aren't doing)). In the end like many others I ended up using it to create a 'follow me on twitter' button. Sure it's a bit more dynamic than a static image but it's a lot bigger than a static image as well.  There is a difference of about 20Kb when the page loads with and without the @anywhare javascript.

Statistics with @anywhere
Page size with the @anywhere javascript included

Page load statistics without @anywhere
Page load statistics without the @anywhere code

Sounds bad huh? well maybe, but not even half as bad as Facebook's like button. It adds about 70Kb to the page size and doesn't do anything other than display the like button. In the case of @anywhere, it's got a load of features it's just that we are not making use of them.