September 02, 2010

Echofon breaks in Linux

One fine day,when I logged onto my Ubuntu, and started firefox, I got a message box with no contents in it other than an OK button with the message box title reading 'Echofon'. As I couldn't figure out what was causing this error, I executed Firefox from the terminal in background mode. The error message that was printed on the terminal is :
"Can't get OAuth signer. Use Basic Auth instead. / Cc['@naan.net/twitterfox-sign;1']"

I googled this, and came to Echofon for Firefox, where many people have put their comments that Echofon is broken for Linux or has been discontinued for Linux from version 1.9.6.5 onwards.

Mine was that version, and so as per the suggestions in that page, I reverted back to version 1.9.6.4,and voila echofon is working fine.

Morever I saw that Twitter has sent me a mail regarding discontinuation of basic authentication and enforcement of "OAuth" authenatication method. This might prove useful in centrally controlling all applications which have access to twitter timeline.

But the news of rolling out of "t.co" url wrapping doesn't sound so good, in spite of their claims of providing protection from potentially malicious website and reducing obscurity in URLs provided over twitter.

With this in place, I wonder what would happen to services like bit.ly which provide realtime analytics for such shortened links. Anyway it will be deployed in a beta mode in a couple of weeks, and made mandatory by end of the year. So, have to wait and see what happens, and how tweeples react to these new regulations and rules in twitter,.

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