Twitter’s @anywhere will spread tweets, log-ins across the web, COO Costolo says

Twitter chief operating officer Dick Costolo gave more detail today on the company’s new @anywhere service, which will make it easier to tweet and follow Twitter accounts across the web.
The goal of @anywhere is to “remove friction” and “make it easier for people to tweet in the context of what they’re doing on the web,” Costolo explained. Twitter co-founder Ev Williams first unveiled the concept last month in Austin but gave little information on how it would be implemented.
Costolo said @anywhere has four components. It lets people log-in to Twitter on other sites and tweet directly from other web properties. It also makes it easier to follow people’s accounts without searching for them on Google or Twitter’s site. For example, if a news story references a person like President Barack Obama, their name can be a link to Obama’s Twitter account that triggers a pop-up or “Hovercard” which lets you follow them directly from the story. (We use that feature occasionally on VentureBeat.)
Costolo said @anywhere is only few lines of Javascript and doesn’t require serious time from developers.
“We’re not in the business of helping these publishers do deep integrations,” Costolo said. “We’re looking for the developer ecosystem to help out.”
It also can support “Connect with Twitter,” which resembles Facebook Connect. (Costolo hadn’t gotten to that yet in his presentation.)