Monday, August 16, 2010

The Oauthcalypse Has Arrived

Twitter has changed the way third parties, such as Adjix, interface with their system. This change begins today as Twitter will limit the rate at which third parties can authenticate a user with their Twitter username and password. Throughout the rest of the month, Twitter will continue to throttle the access rate and then completely eliminate username and password authentications on August 31.

The reason for this change is so that Twitter users no longer need to give out their Twitter username and password to third party websites.

The Future
The new method that will replace username and password authentications is called OAuth and this change has been jokingly referred to as the "Oauthcalypse" since some Twitter websites and applications will, undoubtedly, fail to make the change and get left behind.

Instead of giving out a Twitter username and password, users will click on a button which will take the user from the third party website to the Twitter website where they can authorize the third party (i.e. Adjix) to post to Twitter on their behalf. A big advantage of this technique is that a Twitter user can revoke access from a third party by logging into their Twitter account:
(Settings -> Connections -> Revoke Access). In the past, revoking access meant that a user would have to change their Twitter password and then update all of their other Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck, twitpic, etc. with the new password.

Changes for Adjix Linkers
Adjix has deployed the new changes which affects Adjix Linkers who use the Adjix2Twitter bookemarklet for sending out tweets.

To update your Adjix account, simply log into your Adjix Linker account, click Edit Profile, and then click on the Twitter button. Twitter will display a page to confirm that you want to connect your Adjix account with your Twitter account. Just as before, you can configure Adjix to tweet out to one or two of your Twitter accounts.

Don't hesitate to let us know if you have any questions.