Twitter Ready to Close Access Without OAuth

Today is the last day Twitter allow third party applications to authenticate to Twitter directly. Starting tomorrow, all authentication processes from the app to gain access to Twitter must use OAuth.

Twitter itself has communicated this mechanism to developers since December last year, so it is hoped that the developers have prepared an update of their application so that starting tomorrow they can continue to have access to Twitter.

So far, application developers for Twitter have had a choice between using direct authentication by sending a username and password to the Twitter API, or using OAuth. The first method obviously opens a big hole because it means that we give our data to a third party, who ideally sends it directly to Twitter for authentication, but does not rule out the possibility for stubborn developers to store the username and password data.

With OAuth, the authentication process that occurs is granting an application access to Twitter, by entering a username and password directly into Twitter. We can manage which applications we have given access to on the page Settings > Connections.

According to Twitter itself, all the most popular apps are ready for this change. So starting tomorrow, don't be surprised if your favorite Twitter application suddenly can't connect to Twitter, first try updating to the latest version which most likely already uses OAuth.