Cooperation. It’s the going trend on social media sites these days. All your information from one site can be parsed to another. Feeds from your blog can be redistributed to countless sites across the web. Photos from your Flickr account and updates from your Twitter stream can show up on your Facebook profile. The beauty of it all is that your time spent on a given social media site is streamlined, as your activity is being automated. It’s like you’re in more than one place at the same time. But there’s one tiny thing that can disrupt this virtual omnipresence–updating your password.

It happened to me earlier this week. I noticed I was frequently being logged out of Twitter, which means that someone could have accessed my login credentials and is signing in from a different location, thus signing me out on my computer. So I changed my password.

Two days later I noticed that I wasn’t auto-following new users that follow me. I also noticed that the RSS feeds I have imported into my Twitter stream weren’t coming through. What happened? The third party applications like Twitterfeed and TweetLater I use to perform the above functions rely on my Twitter username and password in order to access my account for these automated features. So when I update my password on Twitter, these third party apps no longer have the correct information.

It was a swift reminder that I needed to go update all the third party applications that I use to manage my Twitter account. There’s no easy process for remembering to do this each time you update privacy settings for a given social media service. But given the streaming nature of Twitter and the ease by which you can push content and perform remote operations through Twitter apps, the necessity to remember to update third party apps increases exponentially when it comes to Twitter.

The best advice I can give is to keep your third party app usage to a minimum. Select applications that perform a variety of functions for your personal needs, so that when the time to update Twitter and all your peripheral applications cmes along, it won’t be such a consuming task. It may even be worth your while to pay for premium features from a preferred service, if this will enable you to centralize the activity that’s going on around your Twitter account.

As Twitter becomes more popular and cooperative network platforms enable more remote activity via other sites and applications, we’re likely to see even more services that provide these centralized activity hubs. They’re likely to include support for multiple social media sites as well, which may continue to be a catch-22 in some situations such as an updated password, but the benefits will outweigh the burdens.