Starting on Tuesday, the million or so third-party applications that use Twitter data must start encrypting all of their communications with the Twitter API (application programming interface), in order to improve security and maintain data integrity. In a short message posted on its service, Twitter announced that, as of Jan. 14, all data requests sent to the Twitter API must be done through the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) protocol, or its successor, the TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol.