There has been some concern over the security of twittering under a private profile of late. Several rumours and blog posts have come up lately saying that the privacy of "only show my friends" profiles, has been violated. This article in the Guardian is one such article.

The team at Twitter Inc has been quick to point out that it is up to the developer to protect the users privacy.  It is not a flaw in the Twitter API but a flaw in the 3rd Party applications.   Here is the message from co-founder Biz Stone:

"So what the heck are they talking about? Some Twitter users willingly provided their usernames and passwords to a mash-up project called Twittervision (a service unaffiliated with Twitter except that it accesses our API). They did this so they could be part of the fun and access more Twittervision features. However, Twittervision was not checking to see if any of these folks had marked their updates as "protected." Starting today David Troy, the creator of Twittervision, tells us he'll make sure to check for this.

As a reminder, please note that mash-ups and other experimental projects built using the Twitter API are totally awesome and fun but developed by folks outside of Twitter. So, we don't necessarily test them all out. If privacy is a concern, we remind you to refrain from supplying your Twitter username and password to other people, sites, or services. For more information about privacy, please have a look at our Privacy Policy."

So there you have the official story.. 

Here is a bit of fun with a video of the working mock up. These guys over at Daily DIY did some interesting hacking to get the tweets and the users picture to display on a small LCD screen. They used a Ruby script to connect with the Twitter API..

Full article and video here

Python - Twitter
A python wrapper around the Twitter API.

Twitter
Twitter 0.1.0 is built on Ruby on Rails and is a command line interface and wrapper for Twitter.

This one is for all the python developers out there. It is a project by DeWitt Clinton that is described as "A python wrapper around the Twitter API". The library provides a pure python interface for the Twitter API and can be found on Google code here .

Python - Twitter has been added to the Twitter Forge .

This is hot off the presses and now Twittervision is allowing you to connect into their app via a new API. From their twittervision API website:

"Yes, it's time. We wanted to publish easy ways for people to work with the location-based information available through Twittervision and Twittermap. This is a start. There is more coming."

It looks like you can get the location and status of a user so far. We will see how the API and Twittervision develops and what they have up their sleeve next. It is just a guess but I assume that they (twittervision) must be getting hit with a ton of traffic these days..