Soon we’ll pass 3 million downloads of WPtouch, the most popular and easy-to-use mobile plugin for WordPress. We expect to cross the mark sometime in the next few weeks!

To celebrate we’re giving away a 32GB iPhone 4S in your choice of white or black!

We’ll draw a winner and make an announcement on Twitter and our blog. If you’re the selected winner, we’ll contact you on Twitter.

Good luck to all entrants!

The contest is now closed. We’ll draw the winner soon.

*Prize is available to North American and EU residents only.

Yesterday we were contacted by the Twitter API team and informed that WordTwit Pro‘s use of the API was not inline with the Twitter’s terms of service for third-party applications. The reasons given by the Twitter API team were:

“[WordTwit Pro] facilitates serial posting across multiple accounts, tweet/retweet automation, tweet branding and automated affiliate advertising.”

After reviewing the alleged violations by the Twitter API team, we are of the opinion that the reasons given are not justified based on the typical use cases of WordTwit Pro users.

First, WordTwit Pro does allow a user to push a tweet out to multiple accounts simultaneously. This feature is meant to simplify management of a website where new post information would routinely by posted to multiple accounts. For example, a WPtouch-related post on BraveNewCode could be pushed to the @wptouch and @bravenewcode Twitter accounts. This functionality is by no means specific to WordTwit Pro; it exists in almost all Twitter clients available today.

Second, while WordTwit Pro does allow a user to automate certain tweets or retweets, all of these essentially have to come at the request of the end-user. This represents a form of tweet scheduling, which is also a standard feature in many Twitter services and clients.

With regards to tweet branding and affiliate advertising, we are ultimately at a loss. Other than the WordTwit Pro application registered with Twitter (which ultimately causes each tweet to be associated with WordTwit Pro), there is no branding on tweets done by BraveNewCode or WordTwit Pro. Each user has the ability to manually edit a tweet before it goes out, which is no different than most Twitter clients. We also provide a very detailed Tweet Log in WordTwit Pro, which shows every tweet that is generated by WordTwit Pro, even if they were not successfully tweeted.

Ultimately Twitter has suspended the OAuth token currently used by WordTwit Pro, which has caused WordTwit Pro installations using the default configuration to stop working. We have tried to communicate with the Twitter API team to work towards resolving the misunderstanding, but as of right now the token is suspended and they have not responded to our most recent attempts to open a dialog or to educate them further about our product.

To simplify the process of setting up WordTwit Pro, we included a generic WordTwit Pro OAuth token registered with Twitter. Since we do not know the nature of the original complaint with Twitter, we can only assume a person or company witnessed some form of SPAM associated with an installation of WordTwit Pro and reported the application in violation. Since we do not control any portion of a WordTwit Pro installation or any tweets that are generated once a user installs the software, we are unable to intervene when any users potentially abuse the product.

Going forward we are forced to remove the default token within WordTwit Pro; this means all end-users will have to register a custom application with Twitter to use with their installation. That also means each user will be responsible for abiding by Twitter’s terms of service for use of the Twitter API. Since the feature to add a custom OAuth application already exists within WordTwit Pro, current installations already using this feature are not affected by the revoked token.

If you have been affected by this, please visit this page for information on how to create a custom application with Twitter and configure WordTwit Pro to use it.

We will release version 3.3 of WordTwit Pro shortly, which will require custom applications for new installations. If you have been using the custom application feature already and you upgrade, your installation should not be affected by this change.

We apologize to anyone who has been affected by this incident, but as the token was revoked by Twitter without any prior warning, we were not able to resolve any concerns without the downtime experienced by customers.

We just pushed out an update to WordTwit, version 2.6. The following changes/fixes have been incorporated into the release:

• Added: Simple character count to post WordTwit status box
• Added: Tweet error messages
• Added: Ability to automatically adjust OAuth time offset
• Added: Ability to utilize a custom Twitter application for Tweets
• Fixed: Bug with apostrophes in category name
• Changed: Stopped a CSS file from loading which isn’t used anymore
• Changed: Logic regarding old Tweet times
• Updated: Language .pot file. Please submit translations to translation (at) bravenewcode.com

One of the most exciting updates is the ability to configure WordTwit to use a custom Twitter application. So instead of having WordTwit Tweet on behalf of “WordTwit”, you can make it Tweet on behalf of your own website, for example “BraveNewCode”.

As you can see in the example on the right, the Tweet was on behalf of the custom application called BraveNewCode. So website owners are now free to create their own applications to enhance their personal or site branding with WordTwit.

Creating Your Own Application in Twitter

To create your own application, you can visit the WordTwit developer site at dev.twitter.com/apps. Once on the site, click the “Register a new app” button in the sidebar.

You’ll then be able to configure all aspects of your application:

The only real “gotchas” are that you must make sure the application is a Browser application and not a Client application. To do that, you must define callback URL, even though WordTwit will override it – simply specify your main website URL here. You must also make sure the application has Read & Write access as opposed to Read-only.

Once that’s done, you should be able to find the application’s OAuth Consumer key and Consumer secret tokens, similar to these:

It’s important to keep these two parameters secret, since someone who obtains them could Tweet on behalf of your application. But in the odd event that they are ever compromised, you can simply regenerate them via the Twitter developer site (we regenerated the ones shown in the example, so the tokens shown above no longer work).

Once that’s done, simply input the two tokens into the WordTwit administration panel and reauthorize WordTwit. If all went well, you should see an authorization dialog for your custom application similar to the one shown here. Then you simply have to grant access for WordTwit to Tweet on behalf of your custom application, and you’re good to go.

This will most likely be the last major update for WordTwit until we release our long awaited WordTwit Pro plugin which we’ve been working on in conjunction with WPtouch Pro 2.2. If you’re interested in being notified when WordTwit Pro is released, please sign up for updates.

We’ve also included an updated POT language file in WordTwit 2.6 – if you’re interested in translating it, please send us the completed translation via our contact form or via the email address included in the readme.txt file in the plugin.

If anyone has any issues with the release, please let us know via the forums or here.

Enjoy WordTwit 2.6!

We’re putting the finishing touches on WordTwit 2.5.2, and wanted to do a limited beta cycle on it due to some of the changes. Here’s a short list of what has been changed:

• A character count has been added to the post area to show when a Tweet is greater than 140 characters
• Error messages have been added to the post area to show why a Tweet hasn’t gone out
• A bug with apostrophes in category names has been resolved
• OAuth (which the Twitter API uses) requires the server time to be accurate. On many web servers the time is wrong. We’ve added the ability to automatically detect the proper time offset to use for OAuth requests

I wouldn’t recommend everyone upgrading to this version yet, as there still may be a few small issues. But if you’re WordPress savvy and want to help us put 2.5.2 through its paces, then please download a copy and let us know how it works for you.

Download WordTwit 2.5.2 Beta »

We’re happy to announce Jessica Beck as the winner of our 32GB iPod touch and WPtouch Pro 5-Pack contest!

If you’re the winner we’ll contact you via e-mail or through Twitter. Once we get your address info we’ll mail out the iPod touch today, and setup your WPtouch Pro 5-Pack license.

Here’s Jessica with her iPod touch!

Ms. Beck and her new iPod touch courtesy of us!

How We Chose The Winner

We counted up and numbered all the comments on this post and the re-tweets on Twitter for the contest and entered them into this random number picker to get our winner.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest, especially those who shared their stories about BraveNewCode and experiences with WPtouch, WPtouch Pro and WordTwit, our WordPress plugins.

We’ll be having more contests as we go along, so stay tuned to BraveNewCode on our blog, Twitter, and Facebook pages.

Best,
The BraveNewCode Team