I’m writing a tool in our web app to allow our users to tweet certain things about our app via the Twitter API. In all the documentation I’ve seen the Twitter API has you submit the user’s username and password via XML or JSON. It would make sense from a usability standpoint to save the username and password for easy reuse (so they don’t have to log in everytime they tweet. Although I want to make sure we are allowed to do this before we actually implement the saved username/passwords.
Does anyone know if there are any laws that prevent us from doing this? Is this just what Twitter expects us to do?
Update: Basic authentication was removed from the API on August 16, 2010
While you can certainly store people’s usernames and passwords for use with the Twitter API, this is not the recommended approach. Try Twitter’s OAuth Authentication instead.
Twitter will eventually deprecate basic (username/password) authentication in the future. Mid-2010 is likely.