xAuth for SmsTweets

SmsTweet as you know is a fun application that I created to let me update my twitter status using sms. It gives me a great flexibility to update my twitter status on the go. Users either register on the website using OAuth or I would store their username and password HTTP digest if they registered using their mobile phone only. Former was breeze but the later caused a little bit of problem. For people who registered using OAuth, Twitter displays the source as my application (SmsTweets), but who registered over mobile phone (with their username and password), it displayed the source as API. That caused a little problem for me to track people who were tweeting through my application.

Recently Twitter released xAuth using which applications can request user tokens by just providing their username and password. This has been a pending request for a long time mainly by desktop and mobile based twitter clients. For them access to the web may not be straight forward and it was difficult to get oauth access tokens.

But the access to xAuth is limited. You need to send an email to api@twitter.com to enable your application for xAuth. Once they have enabled your application, you can pretty much follow their documentation to get it working. Documentation is far from clear right now, and it may take a lot of iterations and exchange of emails to twitter to get it to work for you. As was the case for me. But finally I got xAuth working for SMSTweets, and I have moved all my users who had provided their username and password over mobile phone to OAuth based authentication.

And yes, Now I can get rid of all the duck taping that I had done to get OAuth based and HTTP based authentication to work.