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Twitter Introduces OAuth And T.Co

By Elmar Sandyck

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 03Nov2010 Word count: 405 Viewed: 407 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

If you've been a Twitter user for quite sometime now, then you must already know about the changes (Twitter Applications and OAuth) that they announced recently about Twitter Apps and URL wrapping. In case you missed these updates for Twitter Apps, let me tell you about it.

We all know that there are thousands of applications built using the Twitter API, right? They come in many varieties, including desktop applications, websites or Well, the first update has something to do with authorization rules for these applications:

The first update: Changes to how users authorize third-party Twitter applications.

Applications will begin to use OAuth to access Twitter accounts. This Twitter Applications and OAuth update is intended to make applications more secure and centralized.

OAuth enables Twitter applications to access users' accounts without directly asking for, or storing, their passwords. Twitter says that desktop and mobile apps might ask for a password once after this app update is in full effect, but will not need it again. We can view a list of all authorized apps under the "Connections" setting in our Twitter account.

According to Twitter, what this means for us is:

Applications are no longer allowed to store your password.

If you change your password, the applications will continue to work.

Some applications you have been using may require you to reauthorize them or may stop functioning at the time of this change.

All applications you have authorized will be listed at http://twitter.com/settings/connections.

You can revoke access to any application at any time from the list.

For more information about Oauth, visit the Twitter blog http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/twitter-applications-and-oauth.html.

The second update: Making URLs more manageable for users wanting to share links.

Many Twitter users use bit.ly to shorten URLs. There's also ow.ly in Hootsuite, but Twitter is expanding its own URL wrapping service -- t.co. Links shortened using this will still show the domain and part of the URL so that users know what they are clicking on, and the cool thing about this is that users will be quickly routed through Twitter's malware checker before being processed on to the link itself!

These updates for Twitter applications will be slowly rolled out for some users over the next few weeks, and should be available to everyone by the end of the year.

What do you think of Twitter's new updates?

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