Habitually Good

With all the brouhaha around Twitter being phished and mass hacking of Twitter administrative functions and major accounts being compromised, its no wonder bloggers are making posts which implore people to log in and change their passwords.

One post by Chris Brogan in particular made me think a lot. He said:

Log in. Change your password. And then think REALLY hard about which services you’re giving your password to.

(I added the emphasis to the part which made me think). Then I realized that careful as I am, I did give my password out to a service which automatically tweets my blog posts. I did change my password, but I still want an automatic tweet to be sent whenever I make a blog post.

Luckily, I use Windows LiveWriter for blogging.

Introducing TwitterNotify – a plugin for LiveWriter which will allow you to safely update twitter whenever you make a post. You don’t have to worry about exposing your Twitter credentials to a third party database on the Internet which can be hacked.

The way it works is that when you use LiveWriter to publish a post on your blog, it will pop-up a screen asking you whether you want to tweet this post through your Twitter account.

It asks you to sign-in with your Twitter credentials and makes the tweet for you. This is the way I am going to make my auto-tweeting safe – a plugin on my computer which is not giving out my credentials to any third party database. I suggest, if you use LiveWriter, you start doing this for sure. Do not give out your twitter credentials to a third party service. As twitter becomes more and more mainstream and serious, this identity will become much more important.

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