Twitter’s Answer to Facebook Connect

Twitter recently released a product called "Sign in with Twitter," which is bascially the social network’s answer to Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, etc.

Sign in with Twitter is based on OAuth and lets users sign in to third-party sites using their Twitter accounts, much like Facebook Connect does with your Facebook account. Presumably you can now Tweet a link to an article without leaving the article page if it’s on a site that has sign in with Twitter enabled.

"Unlike Facebook Connect, however, Sign In with Twitter doesn’t let webmasters pull as much social context into the third party site – in some ways because that social context is quite different on Twitter in the first place," says Justin Smith at InsideFacebook. "First, the social graph on Facebook (which employs a bidirectional “friend” model) is different than the social graph on Twitter (which employs a unidirectional “subscription” structure). Though connections do somewhat overlap, the nature of the relationships on each is often different."

Twitter provides this flowchart to illustrate how Sign in with Twitter works:

There are 5 Comments. Add Yours.

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Wayne
April 21, 2009 at 3:01 am

Very nice article.

Here’s my latest Twitter web comic: http://bit.ly/VAc15

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TrackerMo
April 21, 2009 at 8:29 am

Great… now we only have to sign in once and our ids are stolen everywhere. Between this and “knowem” I don’t know which is worse.

It also leads me to wonder… is the net turning into one, great globosphere, where you can move seamlessly from one site to another? Casual users already have trouble recognizing those transitions. Will they become invisible to all? And, if they do, who will be in control? And will accountability become a thing of the past? It’s already fuzzy now… maybe that’s because it’s becoming a distant reality… ?

Mo

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proper Seo service
April 21, 2009 at 6:29 pm

I guess we should beware of our personal info then. Anyway, i left both facebook and twitter long time ago.

Good luck! lol

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parvo
April 22, 2009 at 4:06 am

I can’t tell whether this move will be advantageous or disadvantageous for both Twitter and its users. Despite of that, I’m sure many people will be very interested with this Sign in with Twitter.

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Alex
May 11, 2009 at 4:49 am

First Google Friends Connect with 3D view mode:
http://www.sponks.com/fans.php