World Cup 2010 delays Twitter OAuthocalypse

When I last wrote about the impending OAuthocalypse on April 26th it was 9 weeks away, 8 weeks later and the Oauthocalypse is still 8 weeks away. Apparently the severe load and downtime, no doubt experienced by many recently, and attributed to the World Cup has forced twitter to push back the implementation of OAuth to August 16th.

At the moment there are two ways to connect to Twitter apps: Basic Authentication, where you login with your username and password via third party, or OAuth, which enables you to connect to apps without giving away your account information. The “OAuthcalypse” was seen as part of a move to make Twitter more secure and stable and was supposed to be in place as of June 30th, less than 9 days away.
Since the original announcement Twitter has been awash with stability problems and fail whales have been aplenty because of certain errors regarding the setting up and maintenance of Twitter’s internal servers. As such the OAuth switch has been delayed.

Raffi Krikorian, Twitter API’s tech lead, spells out what’s going to happen: “just to review what we’re going to be doing: starting on august 16 we’ll be ramping down the rate limits on basic auth roughly by 10 calls/hour/day ending on august 31st. on the 31st, you won’t be allowed to make any other basic auth calls. in other words, if you don’t do anything, you’ll get more and more frequent rate limit errors as you approach august 31st. starting on august 31st, any basic auth request will get a HTTP 403 response back.”

So just to summarize, the OAuthocalypse will not happen on June 30th, as originally predicted, but on August 16th long after the World Cup. Not the first time an apocalyptical prediction has been a little off…before I forget, here’s where you can keep track on the countdown to OAuth implementation.

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