Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been known for some time that Twitter would be moving away from basic authentication to OAuth for third-party apps; in fact, they’d already officially pushed back the drop-dead switchover date once to mid-August before finally pulling the plug this week. Be that as it may, it makes sense that a bunch of lesser-known, less-maintained apps would fall by the wayside once the old security mechanism got shut down — but HTC’s Peep? Really? Sure enough, we’ve been able to confirm on our own Desire that the Twitter app HTC bundles with its Sense UI for Android is no longer working this morning, giving users an “incorrect username or password” error when they try to connect. We’re not sure if they’ll be able to fix this with a Market update across the board or if it’ll take a bunch of firmware updates to get everyone back on the up and up, but either way, something tells us Twitter isn’t going to flip the switch back on for these guys.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

HTC Peep cooked, served a l’orange by Twitter’s new authentication scheme originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 27, 2009 by CyberNet.

Do you remember when Twitter was a word that only the tech-savvy crowd might have heard of? It was back in March of 2007 that I finally started paying attention to what Twitter was, only because there was so much buzz about it on the blogs I was reading. Between then and now, Twitter has experienced all kinds of growing pains, including outages from traffic overload. Some start-ups don’t survive the pains of growing, but amazingly enough, they managed to overcome them.

About two years after the early adopters really started getting into micro-blogging via Twitter and telling the world in 140 characters or less, what was going on in their lives, “Twitter” and “Tweets” are now common household words. Twittering is even becoming popular among stay-at-home moms, in part thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s recent decision to join in on all of the Twittering fun. She’s one of many celebs who Twitter (or have someone Twitter for them), including:

• Stephen Fry
• Ashton Kutcher
• Britney Spears
• and the list goes on…

Even the radio station I listen to in the morning is all about Twittering, with all of their big DJs detailing their lives in those 140 characters. Two years ago I could guarantee that 99% percent of my friends hadn’t heard of Twitter, and now they’re all about Twittering all day long. Despite this, I still haven’t felt the urge to join them. Yes, I do have a Twitter account, but the last time I updated was way back on July 15th last year. Yikes!

While I’m reminiscing about social networking, do you remember when Facebook was only for college students and it was plain and simple? Now it’s open to anybody in any age demographic, and it’s being cluttered with countless applications. Case in point…. my 60 year old mother is on Facebook and prides herself on how well her virtual Facebook Farm is doing. All of her friends are doing the same thing…

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When the Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) on its final scheduled mission (STS-133), currently slated for November 1, it will be carrying an unusual assistant: a humanoid robot known as Robonaut 2, R2 for short. Last week, NASA launched R2’s Twitter feed, over which the robot will provide updates from its new home aboard the ISS (presumably tweeted by a human surrogate, despite NASA’s whimsical PR photo).

Robonaut 2 has already been busy fielding questions it’s received from the Twitterverse, revealing for the record: “Robots are non-gender by design. I’m an it.” It would seem that R2 won’t be in the running for cyber-chess champion of the universe anytime soon, as it tweeted: “Like many humans, I’d be great at moving chess pieces around, but I’d need help deciding where to move them.” R2 has taken pains to reassure the public of its benevolent nature: “Nah. We’re not taking over – I’m here to help!” In another tweet, Robonaut 2 has disavowed any relation to HAL, though it wouldn’t be inclined to admit it if there were one.

Robonaut 2, jointly developed by NASA and GM, will be a permanent fixture aboard the ISS, whose mission Congress seems poised to extend until 2020. Although R2 will initially  participate only in operational tests, upgrades could eventually allow the robot to realize its full potential–helping spacewalking astronauts with tasks outside the space station.

Stop. Put down this computer, go pick up your iPad and come back here. Now go get this app: Flipboard. Why? It’s pretty awesome.

Flipboard is one of a growing category of iPad apps that build you a personal newspaper by grabbing content from your social networks. The difference with Flipboard is that it actually feels like picking up a magazine and flipping through it, but the supersimple interface hides some powerful features.

Is it installed on your iPad yet? Good. Go ahead and sign in to your Twitter and Facebook accounts (if you like, visit the settings and add your Instapaper ID, too). Now, go ahead and tap one of the big squares and you’re in the Flipboard. From there you’ll see any articles tweeted by friends, photos and updates from Facebook alongside the actual tweets. So far, so much like every other aggregator.

The difference comes with the interface, which is similar in feel to the Wired app. Turning the iPad makes the page reformat in such as way that you’ll keep turning it, trying to work out how it is done. Flipping to more content is done by swiping to a new page, and to read an article, just tap it. If it is a long article, you can either Instapaper it, or tap to read it on the web.

But the next part is really, really neat. Under (or alongside, depending on how you are holding things) the article you get a panel showing any tweets linking that article. Think of it as being like blog comments, only interesting. You can even tweet a response right there.

Once you’re in an article, you can just swipe to go to the next or hit the little “x” to go back to the main page for that feed. But that’s not all.

Aside from Facebook and Twitter, you can add content from a small range of pre-selected sources. Some of these are actually curated by the Flipboard people (FlipTech, FlipPhotos, etc.) but you can also grab feeds from The Onion and other sites, or search for Twitter feeds.

Even better, Twitter lists finally get a purpose. I searched for “Wired” and one of the results was the Wired Staffers list maintained by @wired. I added that and instantly got a section of news curated by over 200 smart and connected people.

Because Flipboard uses your networks like this, the news is pre-filtered and it’s likely you’ll find far too much interesting stuff to read. I have one more piece of good news to pass along. Flipboard is free, and in the App Store right now. Actually, there is yet another thing to like: The promo video (above) is by Adam Lisagor, aka Lonely Sandwich (aka the guy from the Square ads). If that doesn’t sell you, nothing will.

Flipboard [iTunes]

Flipboard product page [Flipboard]

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