fail whale tbiTwitter sent out a very strange email to all of
its users over night about a few important changes the company
is making, including the switch to OAuth that broke many users'
third party Twitter apps yesterday.  What makes the email so
strange?  It refers to the changes as happening "over the coming
weeks," and talks about August 31 as a date in the future. We
received the email after 5 am today, September 2, and we can't
find reports of anyone getting it more than a few hours ago.
Why does this matter?  Aside from simply being weird, the timing
is a big deal because when Twitter switched to requiring OAuth,
any third-party app that wasn't equipped for this simply stopped
working, often without explanation. The change has been in the
works for a long time now, so all major app developers had
released versions of their products that handled the change
without an issue, but users who hadn't updated their apps,
including our own Henry Blodget, were confused and angry.  We've
asked Twitter for a cl