what exactly do you mean - why does that lose you? because it's asking for personal information? for google calendar, wundrbar takes you to google for authentication, and then gets back a token from google and stores that. but not all services operate that way. if you want to use a personal account through wundrbar, though, it need to have some way of authenticating as you with that external service. the benefit is that you can access multiple personal accounts from one place, and that soon you will be able to access them by sending a text message, for example.
"... what exactly do you mean - why does that lose you? because it's asking for personal information? ..."
Hi ngrandy. Pretty much. Here's why:
- To extract information from twitter doesn't require my username + password
- Third party sites that extract usernames + passwd information expose "users" to unnecessary risk of exposing their login details
- From a development point of view using the API is not necessary if you balance the risks of user details compared to product features
The reason I bring this particular point up is that I think this product is very useful & dearly would love it to succeed. But the first time I use a suggested example (eg: 'twitter bootload today') I'm required to sign over my account details. Why? You can get my latest information via RSS without having to get twitter account details.
As a new company you have to listen to what users want and balance what you can offer them and what they need. In effect weighing up the risks of giving them power at the expense of exposing them to harm. For me the risk of handing over my details to simply search for them is not worth it. FriendFeed appears to achieve this balance using RSS, why not other companies? Some observations:
- no SSL evident on twit account gathering (that I can see) so that username + passwd is plain-text
- are twitter account details stored on a third party machine (how is it encrypted?)
- how secure are the details being sent by third parties?
I've looked at the current twitter best practice on third-party sites asking users for personal details for authentication. The result is it appears twitter does not endorse this approach and as far as I can tell until OAuth is offered [0] there is no real secure way. So why offer it? So I'll go one step further and get an official twitter response to the best practice for third party developers using the twitter API and user account info. You can follow here [1].
My twitter account is my personal information channel akin to my phone account. I don't hand it over to anyone easily. Asking these types of questions about user details & security is making a personal statement about yourself.
hey bootload, thanks for your detailed response. you raise a lot of good points. we've definitely spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.
first, you're right that just extracting info from twitter doesn't require username and password. our initial twitter interface is an update though, which does require authentication.
- we do use SSL for all usernames / passwords that are submitted, though we should make that clear, b/c right now we don't give an indication.
- because twitter does not offer token-based authentication, and because we do not currently want to store passwords, we are actually submitting to twitter via the web interface; that means we submit the u+p just once, and then we hold onto a cookie, but not the u+p. when we login to twitter on your behalf, it is via https.
- one goal in the near / mid term is to give users a choice about the combination of privacy / convenience that they want. right now we have opted on the side of privacy, since we're not storing usernames and passwords. but some users have told us they would like wundrbar to basically act as a password manager, so we'll be building in that option.
- i hope twitter (and other sites) implement open auth soon, because i know there are alot of users who will be more comfortable using wundrbar through that authentication mechanism.
"... hey bootload, thanks for your detailed response. you raise a lot of good points. we've definitely spent a lot of time thinking about these issues. ..."
hey ngrandy, sorry for the delay in getting back to you and thanks for
explaining your setup. It reads like a well considered approach ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2348875304/
lost me at "enter your twitter username & password". certainly don't need to do this with google, icerocket, yahoo, altavista.