You may not know it, but there are more than 250,000 third-party applications that can be used to enhance your Twitter experience. These applications come in many forms such as desktop applications, websites and/or mobile applications for iPhones, Blackberry and more.
On August 31, 2010, Twitter placed some restrictions on the way these applications can access your Twitter account.
These third-party applications are now required to use OAuth. OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access Twitter on your behalf, with your approval, without asking you directly for your password.
What does this mean for you? First and foremost add-on applications will no longer be allowed to store your password. And if you change your password, the applications will still work.
Some applications you have been using may require a re-authorization process because of this change.
In addition, in the coming weeks Twitter will be rolling-out their new link wrapping service t.co. T.co wraps links in Tweets with a new, simplified link. Wrapped links are displayed in a way that is easier to read, with the actual domain and part of the URL showing. It will allow you to know what you are clicking on.
For better security, when you click on a t.co wrapped link, your request will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware before you are forwarded to the destination URL. Twitter promises this will all happen in an instant.
The true up-side of this functionality? T.co removes the obscurity of shortened links that you now experience with add-on apps like bit.ly, so you have an idea of where a link is taking you.
Twitter expects to roll out link-wrapping to all users by the end of the year. When this happens, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL.
Comments
I like it. I'm not a user of third-party apps because I've never been comfortable handing my authorization to the ether. I'm also happy that they're introducing a good solution for link wrapping.
two issues come to mind, click tracking and backlinks. Twitter and stats don't go together so all click tracking data would be used by Twitter alone. The other is that all, I mean ALL clicks would be via 301 so bye bye to backlinks. Also if URL is visible, can it also be copied to clipboard. Even here only a small number would go through the trouble. Even now, Twitter does everything to increase the dominance of twitter.com so much so that even profiles twitter.com/username have no alexa ranking. Twitter is getting greedy.
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