no more twitter passwords… support for OAuth beta

I’ve been working on twitterfeed support for twitter’s OAuth beta for a while, and am pleased to say that the first version of this is now live.

What this means for you is that in order to allow twitterfeed to post updates to twitter on your behalf, you don’t need to let us know your twitter password anymore. To illustrate how this now works, here’s the 2 most likely scenarios:

Creating a new feed:

After clicking on “Create new feed”, instead of the twitter username/password fields you’ll now see this:

Clicking on “Authenticate at twitter” will take you to a page on the twitter servers, looking something like this:

If you’re not already logged in to twitter, the page will display the login prompt to login to the twitter account. Also note that if you own multiple twitter accounts, and want to post a feed to a different account from the one you’re currently logged in as at twitter, click on the “sign out” link on this page before proceeding.

Once you click on the “Allow” button, you’ll be taken back to the new feed page on twitterfeed, which now should display something like the below, and you can continue setting up the feed (i.e. specifying feed URL and selecting the options etc.) as normal.

Editing a feed (moving from passwords to OAuth):

You will probably want to move your existing feeds, which have been set up with twitter username/password, over to OAuth. Although this is not required (and existing feeds set up using username/password will continue to work), it’s certainly highly recommended, as it’s safer, and means you can change your twitter password without having to update your feed settings in twitterfeed. To do this, simply click on the edit link of your feed under “my feeds”:

(the edit link is the “pencil” icon under the “Actions” header)

You’ll now see this prompt:

When you click on “Use OAuth”, you get the same option you can see above, when you create a new feed, and go through the exact same process. Once it’s all done, click on “Update” to save the feed settings.

One nice thing is that if you have multiple feeds posting to a twitter account, you only need to do this for one feed – once a feed has been linked to a twitter account via OAuth, any other feeds in your twitterfeed account that post to the same twitter account will automatically use OAuth rather than the username/password.

Known issues:

• twitter OAuth support is in beta, and is not a final release, so things can sometimes break. I have left in the option to use username/password authentication in case someone has insurmountable problems with any aspect of OAuth. At the same time, if you do have problems with OAuth, I’d be very interested to know, so please report any issues you find at http://getsatisfaction.com/twitterfeed
• the OpenID reminder and feed transfer pages aren’t working if you set up your feed with OAuth (simply because these pages use the twitter username/password combination to find your OpenID, and with OAuth I don’t have this information anymore). I’m working on a way around this – it looks like there is a feature being worked on in the twitter OAuth implementation that may let me check authentication rather than re-authorize. As soon as this is a little more settled I’m hoping to have a reminder and transfer page ready which also uses OAuth to confirm the twitter account ownership.
• the twitter OAuth implementation currently only allows one valid token per twitter account and application. This means that you should have all feeds posting to a given twitter account within one twitterfeed OpenID account, because I store the tokens on a per-twitterfeed-user basis. This is quite unlikely to be a problem for many users, but if you’re likely to have set up multiple feeds to the same twitter account using multiple OpenIDs, it’s best to consolidate them before moving them to OAuth. You can do this simply by logging in to twitterfeed and then go to https://twitterfeed.com/transfer to move all feeds posting to a given twitter account to the OpenID you’re currently logged in as.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Connecting your Blog to Twitter
• Creating a Twitter Bot
• Amazon affiliate links now post to Twitter in two clicks
• Twitter Talks Data With Microsoft, Google â All Things Digital