Some time ago Chris Heilmann did a blog post about being able to detect the currently logged in user via an unauthenticated call to twitter’s REST API and get a web page visitor’s twitter account and some of it’s information along with the most recent post. All this with the help of the Twitter API and some simple but clever JavaScript.
This is one cool thing that makes the web what it is, being able to freely share and retrieve information. Although in my opinion it’s a fault from the twitter guys to let this happen. To let someone get hold of that much information of other users without their explicit permission.
Now the Twitter API guys have realized this and blocked this feature.
I don’t think this feature was all bad, but it could be perceived as too generous, the ability to detect and display the persons username and image is enough and should not be of concern to users, this is after all already available to everyone from the Twitter web.
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posted on
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 5:51 PM