I’ve mentioned here before that my intentions for SocialToo are for it to remain secure. My pledge was that, even though Twitter required us to store your password in order to perform functions such as auto-follow or auto-unfollow, we would only require it for such functions, and were doing everything we could to keep your information secure. We were finally able to take that security one-step further today. Today we’re launching Twitter’s Oauth, which means to login, you simply click one button, enter your credentials on Twitter’s site, and we never ever see your Twitter password.
This step follows our integration with Facebook Connect, which means in the future, there are no more usernames to remember on SocialToo, no more passwords to remember, and logging into your account is as simple as basically clicking a button on our login page. Expect to see more services added to this page very soon. We figure if you already have accounts elsewhere, why should we duplicate that effort for you on our site?
I’d like to encourage all our users to go and log in now. We are currently in the process of converting all our scripts to use your OAuth credentials and not your Twitter credentials, and in one month from today, we will begin deleting your Twitter passwords from our system. The only way your auto-follow and other Twitter features will work after that is if you have logged in via our one-click button through Twitter (the “sign in with Twitter” one) on the login page. We’ll try to remind you once more before this happens. My goal is to not ever have any of your social network passwords on our system.
In addition, if you’re a Perl developer, we’ve created a series of valuable authentication libraries on the Catalyst MVC Framework for both Facebook and Twitter (and soon more networks). Stay tuned to my personal blog and I’ll announce those there and how you can use them. I find them extremely useful when implementing Facebook Connect or Twitter’s OAuth in Perl as an authentication control.
Stay tuned – there’s still more coming. Because of these third-party libraries we’ll be able to streamline your experience on SocialToo even more, and span it across multiple networks in ways we were unable to before. It also removes the burden on you to have to keep track of when you change your passwords on Twitter and elsewhere, and allows you to see, in your list of services on these networks, that SocialToo is one of the services you have authenticated through.
I’m very excited about these changes and hope to bring you many more very shortly. Keep watching for more!
Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com