Twitter’s just announced that all developers will need to request greater permissions from the user in order to access direct messages. On the surface, it’s a great move. Granularity in the API is a good thing. Something I’ve been looking forward to.
Unfortunately, in order to access Direct Messages all clients will be forced to send users off to the Twitter.com website to authenticate. If you’re using xAuth, as nearly all desktop and mobile clients do, you’ll need to break with the simplicity of a username / password sign in and throw the user off to a web browser (or web view) in order to continue.
As you’d expect, Twitter’s own clients are exempt from the change - despite the fact that it’s fairly easy to extract the OAuth keys from Twitter for Mac to use them to masquerade as that app - and apps such as Twitterrific, Tweetbot will have to change (nay, ruin) their sign-in flow to simply continue working.
Posted on Wednesday May 18th, 2011
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