Twitter: anchor to "twitter.com/home?status" authentication conerns

Question

If I provide an anchor that that takes the user to http://twitter.com/home?status=TheirStatusMsg to update their status, I don't have to worry about oAuth or any authentication issues, right?

Answer 1

There are few concerns with this approach:

• If the user is not authenticated, this will actually result in a redirect to Twitter Login page and back to the home page. Some users might get confused or alarmed by this.
• The Twitter home page will not update the user status automatically, it'll wait for the user to click the post button there. Thus, posting will be a two (three with the login) steps process for the user - not the smoothest experience.
• You get no confirmation about the update, or error message.
• The Twitter page stays open in the user browser.
• Twitter might have different load-balancing and reliability rules for the web site vs. their API servers, so your users might see the fail whale more often.

If you don't think any of these affects your user experience, you can use that approach without doing explicit authentication with Twitter.