The tubes were abuzz today with news that a site that used the insecure form of authentication to Twitter was basically a huge phishing scam, and that many accounts were compromised.

The good news is this - Twitter is strongly encouraging (read: forcing) sites that connect to them and use their user authentication into using the more secure OAuth method.

Those of you that have already connected your Twitter account to your Linkee account should know that your information is safe, and that since we have implemented OAuth to connect, your passwords are safe, and not even stored on our servers.  OAuth uses a "token" system of validation, so the only place you have to even enter your information is on Twitter.com.

Linkee is one of the few short linking services that has implemented OAuth.  The market leader, Bit.ly, uses the same, insecure, plain-text authentication that was used in this phishing scheme.  It should be noted that authentication sent this way doesn't even use https, so the information isn't even encrypted.

For more information about why you should be using OAuth, take a look at this PC World article.

To connect your Linkee account to Twitter, click on the My Account button at the top of your screen.

Twitter integration is now live on Linkee.com!

You can:

• Tweet directly from Linkee
• Add multiple accounts safely and securely through OAuth
  

Sign in, check it out, let us know what you think!  

July 8th brought big changes to the Linkee service, with the launch of the newest features: version 1.0 of the API, the bookmarklet, and the launch of click-through statistics.

These are just a few of the many changes that we have planned in the coming days.

We'd like to hear your feedback on what we've implemented so far, so if you have any thoughts, please add them here or email us at support--at--linkee.com