Twitter made some significant changes this month that include improving security for user data and providing an enhanced media rich experience for users. The three big changes include moving to the OAuth authentication protocol, a new link wrapping service and a new side bar that displays media mentioned in a Tweet.The OAuth authentication protocol is “an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”
From the user perspective it allows people to control which applications can access their Twitter account, within Twitter at http://twitter.com/settings/connections , without having to share their user name and password with the third party application. This basically allows third party sites, like Tweetdeck and Foursquare, to access the necessary functions required to run their application without giving them full access to your sensitive account information and settings. Even though Twitter announced the move to the new authentication protocol earlier this year some applications will inevitably have not yet made the move to the new protocol. These applications will be blocked from Twitter until they adopt the new protocol since they are no longer permitted to store a user’s password.
Twitter also started using a link wrapping service that is currently deployed in a limited fashion but expected to be used on all linked content soon. Every link will be wrapped in a new link that is posted through Twitter with its own t.co domain. “A user clicking on a wrapped link will pass through the Twitter service to check if the destination site is known to contain malware. Then it will forward the user on to the destination URL.” MarketingVOX While Twitter has not publicly announced anything it is easy to speculate that Twitter will likely create its own analytic service providing statistics on the linked data.
The biggest change from a user experience will be the addition of a side bar that will display media contained in linked content within a Tweet.
For example, a user clicking on a tweet that links to a video on another site will not have to leave Twitter to view it as it will be present in the sidebar window. The rollout of this new functionality is being deployed on a limited basis and should be available to all users by the end of 2010. One other small, yet notable improvement, is the movement of the search bar to the top right of the screen where it is easy to find.
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Amazing how their link-wrapping service is so small now (t.co is just 4 characters!).
ReplyDeleteFunny, the twitter mouseover exploit the other day that I saw was also using this URL to cause havoc:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1313981/Twitter-mouseover-worm-redirects-hundreds-thousands-users-porn-sites.html