by Craig Buck

Created on: September 03, 2010

Mobile devices are relied on so much nowadays by people requiring on the spot information. When a fault develops with the software on these devices, it is staggering how much people's lifes are affected. This is what happened on Wednesday 1st September when the Twitter client malfunctioned on certain mobile devices, leaving people without their normal dose of Tweeting.

Initially, smartphone manufacturer, HTC thought the problem was specific to them and, via their Facebook feed, told customers that they were attempting to fix the problem which was also affecting the HTC Friendstream application which merges all social networking data together into one interface.  It soon became evident that the problem was actually more widespread as the Twitter status page admitted that the problem was actually at their end.  They specified that the clients that were having problems were the HTC Peep software, the MOTO Blur, all Nokia Twitter apps, all Samsung phones except, rather interestingly, those running the Android OS and Huawei phones.

Users trying to log into their Twitter accounts via any of the previously mentioned methods were getting authentication errors from the Twitter servers with messasge like "Error from Twitter. This method requires authentication".  The problem was caused by Twitter moving its authentication to Oauth which uses a different authentication model to the current system.  This move was announced in December 2009 and although on the whole the move went smoothly, the devices and software listed above appears to have fallen through the net which does seem a little surprising seeing as the list does include some very popular means of using Twitter which should have been included in the testing process.

Twitter have managed to act quickly on this issue and released a fix within hours of the problems being reported which does appear to have worked.

The main advantage of the new Oauth system is that you will only need to disclose your Twitter password to Twitter itself and not the third party apps which link into Twitter.   Twitter will then pass on a token to the third party website confirming your login and will also pass rights through to the calling app so that it only has access to the parts of your account that it needs, hiding all of your sensitive information in the process.  Although this issue has been inconvenient for, what is in realitiy a small group of users, the benefits in terms of a more secure Twitter experience will far outweigh this inconvenience.

Learn more about this author, Craig Buck.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.