Every Twitter developer has been made aware that this day may come, and now the date has been set for the termination of basic authentication on the Twitter API.

Twitter is to terminate support for basic authentication on the 30th of June 2010, from that day any applications that makes use of the Twitter basic authentication method to log users into the service won’t work anymore.

Good news is that there is an alternative method and is much safer way to use your Twitter credential to access services. It’s called OAuth and it does not require users to enter any of their credentials, the service will just redirect you to the Twitter service once and ask if you give permission to the application to access your service.

Facebook also recently introduced their brand new Graph API that is basically equivalent to Twitter’s API in the sense that it also makes use of RESTfull calls and uses OAuth for authentication.

If your Twitter application is still using basic authentication to retrieve data it’s time to switch over to OAuth as you only have 9 weeks left before your application won’t function anymore. Please note that this only applies to the RESTfull API and not the streaming API. Check out the count down timer here.

For more on how to use OAuth for your Twitter applications visit the Twitter Developers Authentication page.

I made TweSMS use OAuth from the start, is your application OAuth ready?