You may be aware that because of its unsuitability as a mechanism to give third-party applications suitable access to a user’s account, Twitter are phasing out Basic Auth at the end of this month, supporting only OAuth from then on. This is annoying for those of us who individually automate some aspect of our Twitter use - Dave Winer’s reaction is illustrative. I recently sighed and reluctantly updated the relevant bit of my homegrown blog admin. (I followed the same kind of approach I used recently for the Facebook graph API.) The reason it irks is that although OAuth is surely appropriate in a third-party developer API, it is not so for a client API that allows an individual user to script their regular interactions with a web presence. OAuth is overly heavyweight. It makes assumptions that are not true. And it does not reflect the simple client usecase - a way to automate the things I can do by hand without resorting to robot-clicking and screen-scraping. If some action or resource... - Anthony Bailey