Twitter Changes to Authentication
Occasionally I use Twitter clients other than Buzzbird just to kick the tires and see what else is out there. By far, my favorite for OSX was Kiwi . It was lightweight, nice to look at, and did everything I needed. Whenever I was discouraged by working on Buzzbird, Kiwi was usually my go-to client.
Yesterday, Twitter, Inc. announced that they were making changes to their authentication logic. The short story is, third-party Twitter clients (i.e., those not written by Twitter, Inc) will now need to send users through a web browser to authenticate if they want to have read access to direct messages.
I was going to post a reaction to this, but the author of Kiwi expressed my feelings so perfectly, I’m just going to link to them here:
http://yourhead.tumblr.com/post/5550105265/i-love-you-kiwi-i-know
I threaten to quit working on Buzzbird every other month. Every time I do, I’m encouraged by how many people turn out on the blog and ask me not to, because they actually like my little client. I’m glad it was useful to folks.
Like Isaiah (the Kiwi dude), I wrote Buzzbird for fun and never had any anticipation to make money on the thing. I did it primarily as a way to teach myself Javascript – a language that I wanted to get a lot better at. Now, it’s fulfilled that goal.
If anyone else wants to fork the repo and start their own build of Buzzbird – have at it. That’s the beauty of open source. It’s under the MIT license, so you can basically do whatever you want with it. Maybe someone will be ambitious and write the OAuth authentication piece – it shouldn’t be that hard, as XUL is already a quasi web-browser. But I don’t have the time or energy to turn on a dime and rewrite stuff every time Twitter decides to make a non backward compatible change that hurts the third party clients that they’d be content to not have around.
If you’re looking for a decent FOSS client to replace Buzzbird, I recommend Spaz. The guy in charge of the project is really cool, and he’s dedicated to open source. Yeah, it’s written in Adobe AIR (*shudder*). But I think Ed Finkler (a.k.a. funkatron, the aforementioned guy in charge of Spaz) has plans to re-implement it in other platforms (perhaps Titanium Desktop?). Another bonus is that Spaz doesn’t treat Identi.ca like a second-class citizen. So if open source is your thing, check Spaz out.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2011 at 13:29 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Twitter Changes to Authentication”
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Jorge Says:
What about 10.4 users?, two days ago they forced me to move to the new twitter, works fine on my iBook G4, and I have plenty of twitter apps on it because it’s running Leopard, but I use an iMac G3 almost everyday (i don’t like laptops), with tiger I used Buzzbird and it worked great, now I just can’t use twitter on the old beast. New Twitter is almost unusable and awfully slow, and of course, I can’t install Leopard as I’m using a 600Mhz iMac G3 and there’s no G3 support on Leo, the iMac is fast enough for almost everything, but not for twitter anymore.
