A few hours ago Twitter's OAuth private beta was launched and Inuda was one of the lucky 150 users to be chosen to test it. OAuth is an open protocol that allows secure API authorisation in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications. What it does is allow you to connect your Twitter account to a third party service without you having to share your password with them. This means if you ever suspect an application to be doing something it shouldn't with your Twitter account you can simply turn off their connection without having to change your password. We managed to get a prototype up and running within a few minutes with no problems so we think it's fair to say that you should never give your Twitter password to anyone ever again. In a few weeks all developers of Twitter applications will have access to OAuth and they'll have no excuse other than laziness for not using it. Instead, when an application requests for access to your Twitter account you should be redirected to a page at http://twitter.com which will look something like the image shown above.