Twitter Connections and OAuth: Take control of your Twitter applications.
May 1, 2009 Social Web, Tech Buzz
I just noticed the addition of a new tab in twitter profile – Connections, this helps you to browse and manage the different applications connecting to your Twitter. If you are serious twitterer, and using your account for business, do stop sharing your password with other 3rd party applications unless these applications offer Twitter OAuth. OAuth is an open protocol which secures API authorization from twitter applications to the Twitter platform. As soon as you authorize applications to access your twitter account using OAuth, you will be able to see them and track it via Connection Tab in your Twitter Settings.
In my profile, I have granted 2 applications to access my twitter accounts for retrieving various informations. You can revoke access of these applications if you do not want them in future. Following are couple of them I use with my twitter account.
- TwitterFeed: Takes rss feed feed from MessagingBlogs.com, and tweet to my twitter account http://twitter.com/messagingblogs
- Wefollow: Access your twitter accounts to populate it a directory where people can come and search for the twitter users based various tag
The Connection tab will not appear until you grant the application to access your Twitter account. For example, below is my second twitter account with no 3rd party application access.
Summary
You will see more Twitter applications on the web every day, most of them will provide additional features to your existing Twitter platform. Some applications might seem tempting to install right away, but I highly recommend you to ensure OAuth is being used by these applications (if your a serious twitterer!). The key benefit of having OAuth is you can revoke the access of this application if they are doing something wrong with your Twitter account without the need of changing your password.
Tags: API, Authentication, OAuth, Twitter, Twitter Applications
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