Wednesday, September 1, 2010

OAuthpocalypse

Well, since yesterday Gwibber in the Debian sid distribution is no longer able to access Twitter. The OAuthpocalypse has finally arrived. Twitter has disabled the old HTTP Basic Authentication method and will only accept OAuth. This isn't a surprise; the Debian bug report is a couple of months old already.

I've been thinking of ditching Gwibber for a simpler client for while now, but haven't found a replacement yet. I prefer a console only program but it must be support multiple services the same way Gwibber does. Gwibber's multi-service capability is actually the only feature I really like about it.

I'm using Twidge, a command line program, to read and post on Twitter for the time being. Twidge switched to OAuth a long time ago already. If I feel ambitious I might write some scripts around Twidge to get the features I want. Ambitious. Right.

But really, the reason for this post is that I want to know who on earth came up with the word "OAuthpocalypse." ^__^

1 comment:

  1. Hi, I'm the creator of Gwibber. Much of the actual social networking functionality in Gwibber is implemented in a headless background daemon called gwibber-service. The Gwibber client frontend works by communicating with that daemon through a D-BUS API.

    One of the advantages of this approach is that it will eventually make it easy for developers to build their own custom user interfaces for Gwibber. You could probably use the D-BUS APIs to make a command line interface that sits on top of the gwibber-service daemon, giving you the multi-service functionality of Gwibber without the overhead of a heavy graphical user interface.

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