How to develop a twitter application through twitter API

Since, twitter has changed the world of Internet and of course it has given a new way of application development. Now you can easily develop an application for twitter and use twitter’s user base to promote your application. Since twitter has great traffic ,you can easily take the advantage of it. The best examples of this are twitpic, twitsnaps, digsby,twitterfeed,twhirl etc. To develop a killer twitter application you need two things essentially.

1)A unique idea

2)Twitter’s API

So idea is yours and API is of twitter, and I tell you how to use it.

Twitter has two kinds of APIs.

1)Non Oauth

2)Ouath

Before discussing on APIs, I just explain you first what is Oauth. Oauth is basically an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.Oauth came in existence in 2006 and twitter adopted this in the early of 2009. Previously twitter has non oauth APIs. Most of the famous twitter applications are developed in this. You can use this for such APIs  http://uurl.in/Haw2i

In Non Oauth APIs you directly need the user information like userid,password to access the features. If you are using such APIs user’s twitter login credentials are in your control. You can save them. Like in case of twitpic you give your twitter userid and password to twitpic. Twitpic may save it .Such APIs need user’s exact userid and password to access them properly.

In Oauth APIs you need an authentication token that will be given from twitter only. For such applications you will have to register yourself with twitter. After registration,twitter will give you a Consumer Key and Consumer Secret Key. That you need to use in your source code. In these applications an authentification url is given by twitter to login. When user clicks on that login url , it takes user to twitter where user has to enter his userid and password, if it successful then twitter redirects it to your callback URL (url of your application,that you define when you register with twitter) along with a unique oauth token. On the basis of that token you can use the API to access its features. This is considerd as secure from user’s point of view because user’s login information is secure and you can not catch it.

Now most of the users prefer oauth based applications. But still twitter’s Oauth API is not as good as its Non Oauth API for desktop or mobile applications.Since they are improving this.

You can register your application for Oauth from http://twitter.com/oauth_clients

And the help is available on http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-FAQ

To know about Oauth visit http://oauth.net/

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