You each have a Twitter account (you should follow me), and unless you’re a card carrying member of the Paranoiac party, you’ve almost certainly given out your twitter password to some dumb site that, let’s face it, was so simple to write it could have been written by that nice gentleman from Nigeria that emails you regularly about how he needs your help to work around the frustrating customer service is at his bank.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks, you should be able to change your twitter password one last time and never again enter it anywhere off twitter.com. OAuth is coming Real Soon Now to Twitter!
The most interesting thing to me excerpt from the image above (which came from http://twitter.com/oauth_clients) is the text that says “Welcome to the Develper Beta of the Twitter Application Platform”. They’ve had a documented API since at least as far back as November, but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard the phrase “Twitter Application Platform” before now.
One of the things that has gotten them as far as they are in terms of popularity, especially with the nerd crowd is the never-ending stream of Twitter Toys out there (cursebird, twellow, Twitter Grader), but the fact that they care enough now to put a name to it that you can tell their attorneys want to see followed by “TM” makes me feel confident that they’re finally and irrevocably grokked that the power is in the platform.
One Comment
I am proudly a “card carrying member of the Paranoiac party” and haven’t given my twitter password out to any other web sites. What I have done, gladly in some cases, is setup dozens of twitter clients. Mac clients, windows clients, mobile clients, and even adobe “air” clients have all been graced with my password. I have handed the keys to my social kingdom to them in order to keep from opening a new tab in my web browser to tweet about the freshness of my coffee. So my question is… What is the chance that these clients will support OAuth once Twitter releases it to the public and what will motivate them to do so? (Other than factoryjoe leaving a horses head in their collective beds.)