New Twitter Tools Rival Ease of Facebook Connect
Twitter has quietly added a new way for third-party sites and applications to let users sign in to their service using a Twitter account.
The “Sign in with Twitter” API uses OAuth, an open protocol lets you log in to a third-party site without giving it a unique username and password. Instead, you click on a “Sign in with Twitter” button, and the site will direct you to Twitter where you have the option to allow the site (or application) to authenticate you using Twitter account with a click of the mouse.
Once you approve an outside site, it’s easy for that site to offer tools that interact with your Twitter account. For example developers could make it simple for their visitors to tweet about an article they’re reading or a comment they’ve posted, all without leaving the site.
For developers, this means there’s now a viable alternative to Facebook Connect, which, while powerful, is also quite complex, both for the developer and the user. Granted, Facebook Connect offers more than just authentication, but its complexity can be a burden for a site looking to offer a simple single sign-on method.
But what gives Twitter’s API the edge over Facebook’s is the simple economics of the web. The currency of the web is links, and using Facebook Connect, that currency is being spent behind closed doors.
Links sent in to Facebook may drive traffic back to a third-party site once somebody inside Facebook sees a link and clicks on it, but the long term impact is minimal since Google and other search engines can’t easily index them. Twitter, on the other hand, is indexed by Google and, assuming you use a good URL shortener, Twitter gives your site some Google juice, making it far more appealing to publishers.
Another huge advantage of the Twitter API is that there are far fewer restrictions on what developers can do with the data. Because the Facebook Connect TOS restrict what developers can do with the data users give them, the applications they can build are limited.
With Twitter there are no such restrictions and, if the history of the web tells us anything, it’s that open always wins.
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