140Char

Following my previous post on the implications for Twitter of the first large scale phishing attack, I’ve seen a few interesting responses:

First up, @benbarden responded to my concerns over short urls by suggesting that people could host their own, e.g. 140char.com/link1 etc.

A pretty cool idea, and one that Ben is apparently running on a site already (I might have to beg him for a guide!). The only flaw is that a lot of people run hosted blogs, and will therefore still be at the mercy of shortening services. But for those of us paying hosting costs it’s worth considering.

Then the always friendly @mingyeow from MrTweet asked my opinions on a blog post ‘Addressing Privacy Concerns‘. Suffice to say it’s a very eloquent explanation of how and why the developers of one application are aiming to keep your accounts safe:

One of the points raised is that MrTweet will support OAuth as soon as it becomes available, although it won’t answer every security question, because, as they quite rightly say, securityand convenience are always a trade-off.

There’s some really interesting debate around the use of OAuth from both Jesse Stay on LouisGray.com, and Dave Winer.