Twitter Changes
About a month ago Twitter made some fairly big changes and has continued to do so over the last few weeks. The changes are not necessarily bad, but they did cause some about of havoc on the various places I was using twitter feeds. The biggest change was in the security for pushing feeds to twitter. Previously the interface to the API had very minimum in the way of security. Now it requires creation of an actual application and the application itself must have both a public and private set of keys for authentication purposes. Once this is all set up, one then has to replace the places previous applications were being used with the newly created ones.
Granted, the extra security is a good thing. However, I have twitter tools that are on all my blogs as well as a few other places. Granted, places like Facebook already had some built-in tools to easily utilize and link your accounts, but who really wants to do that? And beyond that, my bigger issue was with number of other places, including the blogs.
After having set up things for one blog I realized something that was important though. The API was for two-way traffic. Basically I could send things out from my blog to twitter – true micro blogger. I, however, do not do that on any of my blogs. I had been thinking strongly about looking at something besides Twitter Tools to integrate my tweets into my blogs anyway, because I was realizing Twitter Tools does not always play nice with the theme settings and would often time make a mess of the widget area when things like hashtags and just links were included. The authentication requirement and the fact that I did not ever post back to Twitter was just the excuse I needed to get motivated and look for something else.
Luckily there were several options to choose from and after a little looking around and testing with a few of the them, I quickly surmised that Twitter Widget Pro was the way to go. As a widget that is taking a Twitter feed, it does not require the long set up of an authenticating API to just pop up a few message lines. Additionally, it has a good deal more options in the settings for giving a more customized look and feel to the widget. In regards to the theme though, the widget respects the settings and still handles things like links and hashtags beautifully.
Bottom line, I think everyone needs to consider whether they ever actually use their blog to send things back to Twitter or not. If, as I suspect is the case most of the time, the NOT is your answer then I think it is time to dump the required overhead and additional setup of authentication and move to a simpler feed based widget like Twitter Widget Pro. Now if I could just get my tweets and Ping.FM to work the way I want all the time in all cases I would be able to take over the world.
