Twitter on Tuesdayannounced via its blogvarious change target at allowing user finer - grain ascendence over their accounts . To engagement , when another software ( such as TweetBot , Twitterrific , or Echofon ) or Web service ( such asFavstar ) quest approach to your Twitter account , it was an all or nothing deal : Granting a third - party access to your Twitter account meant giving it not only the ability to read and post tweets on your behalf , but also full access code to your direct message chronicle . After Twitter follow up the modification it announce today , however , users will get the ability to specify whether they want to allow third - party apps to access that direct message history .
On Wednesday , the troupe clarified just how the young permission framework will sour . In anannouncement to developers , Twitter declared that apps that do n’t need admission to your direct messages wo n’t require to change a matter . Apps that do depend upon offering access to those unmediated messages — in effect , any full - featured Twitter guest —— will need to update themselves to leverage Twitter ’s OAuth scheme .
A agile background : When you log into Twitter via a third - party app or service , that armed service need n’t know or store your parole . It can utilize one of two authorization mechanism : xAuth , wherein the app gets your login certificate from you and sends them off to Twitter for check , and oAuth , where the app really sends you to Twitter to supply your username and password , and Twitter tells the app whether you ’ve successfully sign in or not .
Most connection apps historically rely on oAuth ; you ’re already using the WWW , so sending you off to Twitter ’s situation for a moment during the login physical process flows course . Most non - Web third - company apps — iOS apps and Mac apps , for model — prefer to go the xAuth itinerary , which allows for a more unlined experience .
So what does this all mean ? It means that unless Twitterrific and the rest emergence updates to their apps by Twitter ’s deadline of “ the end of this calendar month , ” those apps will before long be unable to expose or station your verbatim messages . That would obviously leave such third - party apps rather crippled ; any user who swear on lineal messages will instead be greet by some unspecified error and/or blank unmediated messages list .
Thus , it ’s rather likely that we ’ll see a stack of third - political party Twitter app update in the next couple weeks . But in order for those apps to embraceTwitter ’s unexampled permission model , they ’ll need to embrace oAuth . If you use third - party desktop or iOS apps that leverage Facebook ’s login credentialing system of rules , you already have a sensation of what this will bet like .
When you access to Facebook via a third party app , that app must briefly display an inline entanglement view of the Facebook login screen . If it ’s your first time logging in with that app , you ’re then ask to approve the specific Facebook license that app is quest .
Of naturally , asJohn Gruber points out ( warning : piquant speech ) , if you use Twitter with multiple account , the oAuth process will make the initial apparatus process distinctly more thwarting : After using oAuth to enter with your first account via the Web , you ’ll necessitate to lumber out of the Twitter Website and log back in with the next story to connectitvia oAuth . And you ’ll replicate that logarithm out , lumber in dancing for each account you require to set up .
chirrup apps formerly accustom to relying on the more aboriginal - feeling xAuth experience will now involve a interchangeable in - app oAuth Web view , either as their sole approach to logging in , or only when user first essay to get at direct messaging after previously logging in via xAuth .
There are a few Twitter apps that will be excluded from Twitter ’s new oAuth requisite : Twitter ’s prescribed client across all platform . chirrup developer Ryan Sarver confirmed — via a tweet , naturally — that the armed service ’s own apps are n’t dependent to rules for third - party developers .
Various third - party developers on Twitter complained — to each other , to Sarver , and to the populace at large — about this authorization change . Some developer are worried that the Twitter experience will now necessarily feel lousier in their apps when it comes time to lumber in , and consider Twitter ’s self - elision from the oAuth essential unfair .
Back in March , Twitter famously ( and controversially)clamped down third - company apps . In plain off that brouhaha , Sarver wrote :
… Developers need us if they should work up client apps that mimic or multiply the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience . The answer is no .
That stance has already cost Mac users much further development of at least one pop Twitter client . On May 16 — prior to Twitter ’s oAuth announcement — the developer of Kiwi publisheda melancholy web log postannouncing that he ’s stopped further ontogeny on Kiwi ( save for germ fixes ) , because of his perception that “ 3rd party clients are not wanted ” by Twitter . “ Twitter , ” he pen , “ has been slowly chip away at the fun ” of making such clients . Today — again , in tweet form — he wrote :
So happy I threw in the towel on Kiwi when I did . Wish I had given up on Twitter sooner .
Gedeon Maheux , the co - beginner of the Iconfactory , which is the company behind Twitterrific , posteda tweet of his own :
Very very before long you will be able to interact with Twitter in just one agency . Their means . # writingisonthewall
In its scant history , when Twitter has made controversial proclamation , it ’s incline to stay by them . The fellowship never resile on “ The reply is no , ” and there ’s little reason to consider the companionship will backpedal on this oAuth decision , either . Whether the developers behind pop third - company Twitter apps will make the necessary change to stay fully compatibile with the service remains to be see . And if they do make this alteration , there ’s no foregone conclusion that they ’ll be unforced to make further update when Twitter ’s third - party requirements are updated next .
