Balboa Park San Diego - Why You Can’t Log in to Twitter from Your New Phone

Source - http://news.yahoo.com/
By - Jared Spurbeck
Category - Balboa Park San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Balboa Park San Diego

Imagine this: You bring your new smartphone home, get it unpacked, and start installing your games and apps on it. But when you go to log into Twitter from your favorite third-party app, it just doesn't work.

Maybe you don't even get a new phone. Maybe you just buy a new Twitter app, a high-end version that actually costs money, and then find out you can't log in on it. Sound familiar? It does to a lot of people now; people who bought Falcon Pro, a $0.99 third-party Twitter app. And according toJeremiah Rice of the Android Police blog, this problem is even affecting people who already bought the app, when they install it on a new device.

It isn't Falcon Pro developer Joaquim Vergès' fault, though. It's all thanks to Twitter's new policies --policies which may soon affect other popular Twitter apps.

From the ground up
The people who use Twitter actually came up with many of its most successful features. Hashtags?Invented by Chris Messina (who now works for Google, according to GigaOM's Liz Gannes). How about the official Twitter app? That was written by Loren Brichter, and was originally called Tweetie. Brichter's app was eventually bought out by Twitter, and the company soon started restricting what the developers of other Twitter apps could do.

Biting the hand
Starting in March 2011, Twitter's rules for app developers began to change. In a now-deleted topic on one of Twitter's mailing lists, Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver wrote "developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." Twitter also began cracking down on app developers by setting stricter guidelines for how tweets should be formatted, and other minutiae.

Pushed to the limit
Finally, in August of last year, Twitter VP Michael Sippey posted on the Twitter Developer blog about"Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API," which was the new version of the system app developers used to connect their apps to Twitter. Some of these changes were relatively minor, such as changing the aforementioned guidelines into rules that could get developers' access revoked if they broke them. The biggest one, however, was giving Twitter app developers a hard and fast limit of 100,000 "user tokens," or individual installs of that app -- a limit that Falcon pro reached just a few days ago.

Why the limit?
Officially, Twitter wants to maintain a consistent experience for the people who use it. Conveniently enough, this also gives Twitter a captive audience, one that it's free to experiment on with new ways to serve people ads. Such as the infamous (and short-lived) QuickBar, which soon picked up a more colorful name from disgruntled user John Gruber.

What to do now?
Developers who need more tokens have to "work with [Twitter] directly," meaning ask permission from the company. Twitter has not done so for any third-party app yet. But that hasn't stopped Vergès from starting a petition on iPetitions, which has more than 3,500 signatures at the time of this writing. In the meantime, he's updated the Google Play app page for Falcon Pro, to let people know that the app will not work for new buyers … and to encourage people who aren't using it anymore to go to Twitter's website and deauthorize the app from their accounts (to free up a token).

If Falcon Pro currently works for you, it should continue to do so until you need to upgrade your phone.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.