Connecting with Twitter using OAuth

Thursday, February 12, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Okay, so the easy part of OAuth is done, I have it connecting to the demo server. Now comes the part where I try to use it to control Twitter. That part, no surprise, isn't working -- yet. I will get it to work. I'm determined.  

This much does work. 

1. I am able to get a request token. 

2. I am able to direct the user to the page where they give the OPML Editor permission to use my account, and I am able to give the OPML Editor that permission. 

3. The OPML Editor, waiting in the background, polling Twitter, determines that it has been given access, and saves the access key and the access secret in the database.  

All that happened in 5 minutes, so I was fairly confident that the next step would work, but blam I hit a brick wall and stopped right there. It's insisting that it cannot authenticate me. 

4. Here's what I want to do, I want to ask Twitter for my friends' timeline. Before OAuth, you'd make a request of this URL, with nonsecure HTTP authentication, and it would return an XML structure that contains information about recent status updates from the people the user is following. I make the request using the same code I used to make the request of the Irish server, the request that worked, but I get back the following result from Twitter: "Invalid OAuth Request."  

I'm doing something wrong but damn if I know what it is!  

PS: Here's the current OAuth app table, for the gutsy Frontier programmers.