Twitter API & OAuth 101 - TVUG October 2009

Twitter API & OAuth 101 TVUG October 2009

View more presentations from Andrew Badera.

Going dark for a few days

Probably won't be blogging much for the next couple weeks. A lot of deliverables and other obligations.

Tuesday the 13th I'll be presenting "Twitter API & OAuth 101 - What's this twit all about?" at TVUG @ VersaTrans in Latham.

Twitter -- it's all over the place, from mainstream media to grade school classrooms. We can't escape it if we tried. A large part of the success and popularity of Twitter is thanks to its open APIs and rich ecosystem of third-party applications. Learn how you too can take advantage of Twitter's APIs for fun and profit, while getting a look at OAuth, an evolving authorization protocol that's come to dominate the Web 2.0 and open API world.

Andrew Badera, CEO of Higher Efficiency, Inc., CTO of multiple startups, is a lifelong geek and longtime technology consultant with 13 years experience on Microsoft platforms. With a focus on
integration, enterprise service bus (ESB) technology and service-oriented architectures (SOA), Andrew finds Twitter and its APIs to be a rewarding distraction.

Tuesday-Friday of next week, I'll also be doing a training class on ActiveVOS (a BPM/workflow product). I haven't done a vendor training class since training on an IBM ECommerce product back in 1999 down in the Research Triangle area in North Carolina. (Incidentally that's also the trip where a gay gentleman became my best friend, plied my underaged-self with liquor, and spent his time, in and out of class, hitting on me. Gross. Is that what it feels like to be female?)

New Twist on Twam

Noticing a scary twitterspam trend these past couple weeks: bambibots and other spambots on Twitter are getting a lot more subtle. A few months back, you saw them spewing out random bits of text obviously taken from other sources, but those bits were often fragments, and the following:followed ratio was hundreds:1 or worse. Account names were still pretty obviously simple enumerations or iterations.

This week, I'm seeing spambot accounts with reasonable following ratios, believable names, and bits of text that would almost make sense as entire thoughts or sentences, if you didn't understand that a word like "uni" for "school" or "college" wouldn't be used by a girl in Louisiana, particularly not in the middle of August.

http://twitter.com/clairemcdaniel2

Big giveaway: name reads "Kayla," Ms. 'Claire.' Ooops!

The linkspam volume has died down. You could almost believe it's a real account, not just a broadcast mouthpiece for porn, SEO and MLM links.

One giveaway the nasty spammers seem to fail to be dealing with: the source parameter. Without an officially registered app, the source parameter describing the app that a tweet was sent from is going to be displayed as "From API." Not "From Web." Not "From Tweetdeck" or "From Seesmic" -- "From API."

With OAuth, there's no reason for legitimate users to be calling in over Basic Auth anymore -- no reason a legit user should be displaying "From API" -- certainly not with any regularity.

Developers: register your app, use the freely available OAuth libraries that are proliferating, and deal with the occasional OAuth downtime.