The SocialToo Blog

Did you forget your password? In an attempt to test Twitter’s OAuth integration, we’ve made a very small move forward to integrate OAuth into SocialToo’s infrastructure. Starting today, those that forget their passwords can simply click a “login to Twitter” button, which will send the user to Twitter.com to log in and approve SocialToo. The user will then be redirected back to SocialToo where they can reset their password if their login was successful. We never see your Twitter password, and your data remains secure. Go to http://socialtoo.com/forgot to give it a try.

For those unaware, OAuth is a standard used by many sites like Google, Yahoo, and now Twitter to enable sites that need your information to not have to store your private usernames and passwords anywhere. In addition, it allows sites like Google, Yahoo, and Twitter to immediately turn off applications which might be misusing your data, making for a much more secure system.

We’re currently only testing this with our Forgot password form because Twitter has openly admitted there are still many flaws and the software is still in beta on their end. Once they’ve confirmed it’s stable enough for production code we will begin rolling this out throughout all of SocialToo, continuing our pledge to your security and privacy.

With this role out, we are now able to begin testing and preparing for a full OAuth launch on SocialToo. In addition, we will be able to give back to the community, as the Perl support for OAuth Twitter examples is fairly lacking at the moment. Since we’ve figured this out, expect some howtos for Perl developers, as well as, as I have time, perhaps some libraries other Perl developers can use to connect to Twitter via OAuth. Because of the technical nature I’ll be posting those over on my blog when they are ready.

This one small step is a large step for SocialToo, enabling us to prepare for something much bigger and larger down the road. We’re excited for the ability to put the control back in your hands again so we don’t have to store your passwords any more. As always, stay tuned here and we’ll update you on when that happens. Also, since this is beta please let us know via our @socialtoo account on Twitter if you see any problems.

Tags: forgot, oauth, password, perl, twitter

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.