Truth be told, I love the Twitter ecosystem almost as much as I love Twitter itself.
I love how the community has embraced Twitter, and created new and innovative services while Twitter twiddles its collective thumbs.
However, I’m concerned that the Twitter party may be coming to an abrupt end.
How come?
The biggest problem is there’s a growing lack of trust among the Twiterrati about Twitter-related services. It used to be that providing your username and password would happen would even thinking about it. That’s quickly changing due to growing concerns about phishing, spam and hack attacks.
In some respects, it’s a sign that Twitter is evolving and maturing. After all, no one pays much attention to nascent services. But when they become big enough, that’s when they become interesting to the evil people out there.
Personally, I’m backing away from any Twitter-related service that ask me to provide my username and password. The issue is I just can’t be sure how this information is going to be used – even if the service looks really cool.
It’s a crying shame because this reluctance could emasculate the Twitter ecosystem, and destroy a huge part of what has made Twitter so interesting.
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7 Comments
No,
this is the best thing that could happen! We've all become so addicted to the process of must build on it, spread it, make 2.0 add, add, add!
Hell half the time at's the hype of a sales pitch of a frind who is hoping to have the next big Twitter ap some VC's wan't to back or buy.
Twitter won from day one because it's minimalist form and function were so not all the other bullshit.
Don't rue it. Return to it.
And trust me, Twitter is NOT twiddling their thumbs.
I agree, that's why I haven't tried any of these twitter apps yet. There are some hope out there
You can still leverage Twitter and build cool/fun/useful apps without requiring users password. That's what I've been doing with http://twtapps.com/(fresh out the oven, btw)
I'm so against sharing the way they're doing it that I wouldn't even build an app where I'd have to handle users passwords (never say never, but at least for the time being.)
All new twitter-supporting projects I've been working on avoid requiring the user's password. For example http://twitmart.org. However, this does put limits on what the third-party apps can do. Twitter needs to implement an oAuth or similar mechanism so third party apps can still do things with the user's permission, but do not have to ask for, or ever see, the user's password.
Recent twitter disruptions are only a wake up call for folks to take reasonable precautions. We've gotten a little lazy with sharing our data. We wouldn't go around giving out our bank card pin number to anyone we purchased goods from.
Yet many are using the same username and password across numerous services and just giving their data for a little fun…. nonsense.
Twitter needs to adapt a system akin to facebook, and google, where the app goes back to the parent web site to confirm identification and permission.
Twitter will be fine.
You say:
"It used to be that providing your username and password would happen would even thinking about it. That’s quickly changing due to growing concerns about phishing, spam and hack attacks."
That should have never been the case in the first place. Security and accessibility should be of paramount importance to Twitter and unfortunately it is not. Nowadays, I find it rather odd that someone would give out their password to a site "without even thinking about it".
I know for my case, part of the reason for not being that concerned with giving out my Twitter creds was a "who cares? – it's only Twitter" attitude. That was when the service was a toy or experiment (in my case, probably expecting to never use it for anything). That changes if you start to care about it or use it etc.
Well, Twitter seems to be taking its sweet time getting around to it. Of course, that seems to be its M.O.
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