Here is an overview of the technical changes required: <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/pages/application-permission-model" rel="nofollow">https://dev.twitter.com/pages/application-permission-model</a><p>The biggest change is that third party apps that use xAuth to authenticate have to switch over to OAuth, otherwise they lose the ability to read or write direct messages. I can't help but feel there is another motive to this.<p>Oh, and the best part? Developers have two weeks to introduce OAuth support (including getting past app review): "We know this will take some time so we are allowing a transition period until the end of this month".
Just hoping this won't affect Tweetie. Obviously it's replaced by Twitter for Mac, but that doesn't work on Leopard. Some bugs have showed, for example, many Twitter clients now offer RT's in a "@user: ..." style. If this ends with a url the url won't work, because it includes the quotation marks in the link.<p>This is obviously a small thing and I don't really mind it not being fixed, but it'd be a pity if DM's break with this update.
The article says 'If you’re not comfortable with the level of access an application requests, simply say “No, thanks”.', which sadly means they still don't allow finer granularity than "No, thanks, I won't use this service at all". The answer I always want to give: "No, thanks, allow read but not write".
it also works in retrospect: all apps that have gotten permission in the past to access your direct messages have to ask again for that. Which basically means all twitter clients have to be updates in the next weeks and ask all users for permission again. Nice job twitter