Twitter Irritations
Ever since Twitter went to OAuth it's been nothing but massive irritation (why they couldn't have kept using Basic Auth behind HTTPS is beyond me; I guess the simplest solution was too easy, or something).
Anyway, here's my issue with their service: it's not reliable. I'll send an API request from my code, with the proper credentials, and it'll work. I'll pick the same code up a different day, and it gives me back 401 (Unauthorized) errors. This is maddening.
At this point, I wish Google would acquire Twitter. Authenticated calls to their services never fail, so maybe the injection of some competent systems people into the Twitter service would help.
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Comments
Re: Twitter Irritations
[anonymous] October 7, 2010 17:55:43.245
As a commercial Twitter client dev, I can only agree in principal.
Something to check for, though, is your date accuracy. If the date you use as part of the OAuth process is not close enough to Twitter's idea of the date, they will reject you. If your machine is hovering a few minutes out of sync of UTC or something, it could cause intermittent problems in addition to the usual problems Twitter has on their own.
Re: Twitter Irritations
[james Robertson] October 7, 2010 19:02:20.757
I've seen that reported - but my Mac is within a minute of my iPhone, so I don't think that's it. Unless they check to within seconds, I guess.