The Original Twitter Trap

I’ve been setting up a blog for my wife recently and one of the functions I wanted for the blog was to post a tweet when she makes a new post.  Hardly breaking any new ground there! I ended up using the excellent WP to Twitter plugin by Joseph Dolson which expertly and extensively provides the functionality to enable this.  In the past configuring the plugin to your Twitter account would have been as simple as entering in your username and password.  But Twitter has disabled that old system sometime ago and have rolled out OAuth in it’s place.  Here’s what Joseph has to say about about the new method:

The process to set up OAuth authentication for your web site is needlessly laborious. It is also confusing. However, this is the only method available from Twitter at this time.

I certainly agree with his take on it!  It’s worth exploring some of the reasons behind this switch and how Twitter is attempting to lock down their platform and trap us by limiting our interactions to Twitter approved experiences.

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