Did you tweet your password?
“Oh! I just love Twitter.”
“Twitter is cool.”
“I can write on the move and the message goes out! Isnt that great!”
“I confess, I am indeed obsessed.”
These are some of the responses I have received from Twitter users who tweet more than 20 times a day. The community of users who adore Twitter and find it useful is no doubt huge. Along with it is growing the number of Twitter applications that could be used. Fancy some? The web is full of applications which could generate move value for a Twitter account with free to use functions like Personalised Auto responders to Twitter follow requests and messages, auto-follow whoever follows you, Twitter Rank Check, Twitter Friend Suggest or even you could try the Twitter CRM. There are thousands of applications, just google them up!
Twitter users are now increasingly using these innovative free to use tools, but do they ever check who owns these Twitter applications? I found that some of these Twitter applications were developed as school or college projects and were launched by students for people to use it for free. Amazing! isnt it? No, its NOT. Most Twitter applications ask you to supply your credentials so that the applications can work with Twitter and you dont know who is storing your passwords!!
And are these applications bug free? You never know, afterall they are student projects. I have just heard a sad story from a friend who lost all his followers because he was using a free tool to send personalised messages back. The tool malfunctioned and all his Twitter contacts were lost!
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Perhaps, this is one of the reason why most recent twitter apps make use of OAuth. You can check out Twitter Open Authentication (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-FAQ#WhatisOAuth). It allows twitter to share its private resources without the need of storing username and password.
Cheers,
Anup
Thats cool! But how do users get to know if Twitter Apps are using OAuth? Any clues what could help our readers and participants at Web Coherence.