Twitter kills off Android TV, Roku, and Xbox apps

Twitter has been slowly culling and consolidating its official apps and is getting rid of some third-party API features. The latest victims are the apps for Android TV, Roku, and Xbox apps. These apps let users watch live streams and view Moments. These apps haven't been updated in a while so it doesn't come as a surprise that Twitter is ending development for them. If you are using these versions of Twitter, you have until tomorrow, May 24th, to use them.

Source: Android Police

Time to change your Twitter passwords

If you just signed into Twitter today, you might get a pop-up notification telling you to change your password. The social network is asking all its 330 million users to change passwords after a bug exposed them in plain text. According to Twitter, they haven’t seen any evidence of breach or misuse of the passwords but they still want all users to change passwords out of an “abundance of caution.” And they’re reminding users to change passwords for any other account that might have the same password as those used on Twitter. When you change your password, Twitter will also show you what third-party apps are linked to your Twitter account and you can review the apps you want to revoke access to your account.

The bug caused an issue in the hashing process that masks the passwords and replaces them with random string of characters before it’s stored in Twitter’s system. What happened was the passwords were saved in plain text in the internal log. The social network hasn’t said how many users were affected but asking its entire user base to change passwords might mean it’s affected a lot of its users. Twitter claims it’s found the bug on its own and are working to make sure this and other similar issues don’t happen again.

Twitter groups and highlights news links your friends share

You might notice some new changes to your Twitter timeline soon as the social network continues to work on being your go-to source for current events. Its latest update highlights the news links your friends tweet and groups them together right in your timeline. Buzzfeed News first shared this new feature and Twitter confirmed with Engadget that this update is rolling out to Android, iOS, and web versions. Whether this is just being tested or is already rolling out to the general public isn’t clear yet. We haven’t seen it yet on our feed but do let us know your thoughts if you spot it and let us know if you like this new change or not.

Twitter Timestamps makes it easy to share specific moments in live videos

Sharing a favorite moment from a Twitter live stream is now going to be easier with what 9to5Google describes as a “YouTube-style timestamp” feature for the social network’s mobile apps. Aptly called Timestamps, the feature will let you tweet from a specific point of the video. So your tweet will reflect what part of the video you wanted to focus on. When sharing you just need to slide to a specific point of the live stream (or replay video) and that is the starting point of the video that your followers will see.

On top of this, those watching live video streams that are still broadcasting, you can easily skip to what’s currently happening by tapping on “live” at any time so you can catch up. This is open for all types of streams, whether those from professional content publishers or those just broadcasting for their phones.