Today’s Monday Mashup coming at you with the help of Melina Hägglund. Let’s get to it.

Hot off the press: Twitter announces @anywhere platform
In his keynote at the South by Southwest festival in Austin today, Evan William (@ev) has announced a new platform, called @Anywhere:

The service will add a range of functionality, such as allowing users to login to third-party websites using their Twitter account – similar to Facebook Connect – and to follow a columnist on Twitter, for example, by clicking on their byline.

Over on the official Twitter blog, they describe the move as adding the Twitter experience anywhere on the web:

Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com… Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

Twitter will be launching @anywhere with several major websites, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube.

CNN says Facebook is its biggest rival
Although Fox News is currently beating CNN as the most-watched cable news network in the US, CNN’s president Jonathan Klein considers its main challengers not to be rival TV news stations, but social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Speaking at the 2010 Media Summit in New York, Klein said:

I’m more worried about the 500m people on Facebook versus the 2m on Fox. The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news. That’s a challenge and we have to rise to that challenge.

Though the average number of primetime viewers has shrunk for CNN over the years, they maintain a very strong online presence.

With recent data from Hitwise showing that Facebook is the fourth-biggest source of US traffic to news sites (behind Google, MSN and Yahoo!), it’s easy its easy to see why Facebook might be keeping CNN up at night.

Twitter, Facebook and Geolocation
The big thing at SXSW this year has been geolocation, and sure enough, Twitter rolled out their geolocation function on twitter.com ahead of this year’s conference. While it’s been possible to access geolocation through Twitter’s API since November last year, only now is it being integrated into Twitter.com for tweets tagged with a location. That said, the integration doesn’t appear to have lasted too long, and it looks like Twitter has just turned off the location functionality. Hopefully we will see it back up again soon.

Meanwhile, Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction. An anonymous source said to be involved in their geolocation project claims that the functionality will be launched at f8, Facebooks’ yearly developer conference.  An update to Facebook’s privacy policy late last year, seems to support this claim:

When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.

According to the source, Facebook is not out to compete with services like Foursquare or Gowalla, but with Google in the fight for small-business advertising. As ever, we’ll be watching this closely.

Facebook vs. The Daily Mail
“The Daily Mail and Facebook are at war, with new media accused of failing to protect children – and old media in the dock for shoddy journalism”. So read the opening paragraph written by Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC where he recapped a high profile battle between one of Britain’s most influential daily newspapers and the world’s most popular social network.

Last week The Daily Mail featured a ‘ghosted’ article by a child-protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas with the headline “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you.” In the article, it was claimed that Williams-Thomas attracted sexually motivated messages from series of men when he posed as a teenager on Facebook.

The only problem, however, was that this experiment was not actually conducted on Facebook at all but another unnamed social networking site.

The Daily Mail has since amended the web article, and made a rare concession by printing an apology on page 4 of the paper. It remains to be seen whether Facebook will take legal action for the “false and defamatory statements in the article”, which it had threatened to do when this story first broke.

Sky creates first head of social media position
In a move that demonstrates its social media savvy, Britain’s biggest spender on digital advertsing, Sky, has announced that it is seeking its first head of social media in its marketing team.

The lucky person who steps into the job will be responsible for all social media activity in its brand marketing department and encouraging audience engagement. A Sky spokesman said: “The aim of this position is to offer an in-house specialist to develop digital strategies alongside above-the-line planning”.

Very nicely timed with the announcement by CNN’s President that he’s more worried about social networks than FOX, the first video installment of a unique Facebook documentary called Goa Hippy Tribe has been released.

Goa Hippy Tribe is using Facebook in a number of ways: as subject matter (in particular the re-connection of the eponymous Goan Hippies via the social network); in part for research, production and content, and also as a platform for marketing and distribution.

Whilst the story behind the film itself highlights the role that networks such as Facebook play in creating new stories for documentary to cover, what’s really interesting is the way Facebook is being used to shape the content and format of the work.

The filmmaker, Darius Devas, has been interacting with the community of people who were part of the scene in Goa as he makes the film, not only shaping the way the film evolves, but building a community that is a part of the filmmaking process.

Interviews and other items of ‘micro-content’ have been posted over time, sparking conversations, building shared connections between the audience and involving everyone in the journey of the filmmaker and the film. There’s even a lively discussion on a separate Goa Hippy Tribe Group page considering the role of Facebook as an enabler, versus the inevitable privacy concerns when old photos and stories are made public.

This kind of collaboration would not previously have been possible, and it’s a particularly effective way of increasing the emotional involvement of the audience, who will be more likely to share links and recommend the film to their friends, especially as Facebook provides the means to easily do so.

All of this starts to change the way we think about broadcast. This project has an obvious community interested in the subject, but there are just as many niche audiences outside of hippies in Goa. As CNN’s President, Jonathan Klein puts it: “The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information.” As these “trusted sources” – our friends – become our audience(s), and we involve them the narrative of our own status updates, the relevance and role of the one-way broadcast media comes into question.