Simon Willison’s Weblog

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

— Blaine Cook

# 13th August 2009, 1:06 pm / apple, blaine-cook, distributedsocialnetworks, facebook, socialnetworks, twitter

I used to think Twitter would never catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. Now I realize I was exactly wrong. Twitter will catch on in the mainstream because it’s somewhat stupid. It’s blogging dumbed down for the masses, and if there’s one surefire way to build something popular, it’s to take something else that is already popular and simplify.

— Matt Maroon

# 20th April 2009, 8:50 pm / blogging, mainstream, matt-maroon, popularity, twitter

The Internet Archive should actively partner with bit.ly / tinyurl.com / icanhaz.com etc. and maintain a mirror database of their redirects

— Me, on Twitter

# 8th March 2009, 2:59 pm / bitly, icanhaz, internet-archive, me, tinyurl, twitter, urlshorteners

As more details become available, it seems what happened is that a Twitter administrator (i.e., employee) gave their password to a 3rd party site because their API requires it, which was then used to compromise Twitter's admin interface.

— Blaine Cook

# 6th January 2009, 9:37 am / oauth, security, twitter

The username/password key's major disadvantage is that it open all the doors to the house. The OAuth key only opens a couple doors; the scope of the credentials is limited. That's a benefit, to be sure, but in Twitter's case, a malicious application that registered for OAuth with both read and write privileges can do most evil things a user might be worried about.

— Alex Payne

# 5th January 2009, 10:47 am / alex-payne, oauth, phishing, security, twitter