Twitter OAuth

What exactly is OAuth? It's an open standard for authorization. It's basically an authentication protocol that allows Twitter users to share their private information stored on their site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, like username and password.

You can create new applications on the Twitter developer site and then run it. Most accounts used to have basic auth, but this was turned off in August of 2010. You can continue to use basic auth but it is recommended to upgrade to OAuth because of increased rate limits that are more than double the current basic auth rate limit.

OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of credentials to their data hosted by a given service provider. Each token grants access to a specific site for specific resources and for a defined duration. This way, users can grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions of the full extent of their data.