A couple of weeks ago both Facebook and Twitter held their respective developer conferences announcing new features, services and changes to their platforms. This post is about how those changes will affect you and Expono. Hint: It’s all for the better.

Twitter Changes

Twitter is going to drop support for third-party services accessing your account using only username and password. Third-party services will be forced to use OAuth to authenticate themselves, this is a good thing as it provides much better security for your Twitter account in regards to third-party services accessing it. Expono already today support both types of authentication. However, everyone who uses Twitter username and password on Expono today need to change to use OAuth instead. We will remove support for username/password authentication in the next update, planned May 30th. Twitter will remove this support for all third-party services on June 30th.

Facebook Changes

Facebook announced a complete new API based on the Open Graph protocol with lots of good news that will affect all users on Expono to the better. We are going to rewrite Expono’s Facebook integration to support these new cool features. Support for the new API will be rolled out in two separate updates where the goal of the first one is to make sure the current integration works seamlessly when Facebook shutdown their old API on June 1st. The second update will expand Expono’s Facebook support and bring the experience much closer to what we have envisioned which is a much tighter integration between photos on Facebook and Expono, and hopefully we can achieve true portable privacy between the systems. If you experience any oddities after June 1st, please, let us know.

UPDATE (2010-05-27)
Facebook won’t be able to meet the June 1st deadline. The new roll out date for the new data permissions feature will be June 30th. A link to Facebook’s announcement can be found here.