I’ve been associated with TwtiterVB for some time now as a contributing developer. Well, that will change here; I have accepted the job of project coordinator on the TwitterVB project. Duane has found that more and more his interests lie elsewhere which I completely understand. He will still be on the list answering questions (probably better than will), but for now I’m going to be the one to take control.
So, now what do we do with TwitterVB? There are several different paths we can go through, but there are some areas that need to be focused on. First and foremost is xAuth. For those of you who don’t know, xAuth is a form of oAuth that makes concessions to those who aren’t too fond of a browser-based environment. It’s a great alternative to those who weren’t so fond of having to open up a browser in the middle of a desktop program.
Twitter has stated their goal to turn off basic authentication by June of this year. Now maybe they will and maybe they won’t. But I intend to be ready for Twitter to turn it off. If they don’t, then we’ll still have basic authentication for a little while. But we’ll have a way to make Twitter communications that are even more secure.
There are a few caveats, though: first off, in order to use this we will have to add SSL support. SSL is not something that I know that well so I’ll be doing a lot of trial and error. If somebody is reading this and wants to help I would be more than appreciative.
Another area that I think we need to look at is mobile development. Duane put it very succinctly in his e-mail; his main platform for accessing the Net is a mobile device. We’ll probably find more and more people wanting to use twitter in a mobile environment. So we should be looking to make sure that Mobile developers are involved with the effort.
Beyond those two areas I can’t see much. I’d like to get TwitVid support, but given the fact that we have Twic.li support for videos it isn’t a pressing issue. If you have some suggestions for features e-mail the group by signing up at TwitterVB.codeplex.com.
