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This is more a curiosity than a request (I prefer using my Gmail account to log into sites); is there a particular reason that users can't log into the Stack Exchange network with a Twitter account, or other OAuth services?

My initial thought was that SO only supported OpenID, but it has a Facebook Connect setup running, which means you have Google, Yahoo, and FB; seems like Twitter is an obvious missing piece here.

I wonder because I was considering trying to setup an OAuth/Twitter sign-in capability for my own site. What's the reasoning there?

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Facebook and Twitter aren't really the same type of provider.

Yes yes, they both use "OAuth" but Facebook uses OAuth2.0 while Twitter uses OAuth1.0a. There is a substantial difference between the two.

In the end, Twitter logins weren't implemented because there's an awful lot of complexity required to do it properly and I think we got a good spread of login providers with just Facebook being added.

Naturally, if Twitter were to make an OAuth2.0 service available I'd be tempted to add it to /users/login.

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    Interesting stuff, I didn't realize Twitter doesn't support oAuth 2.0, I don't support you have any useful links as to how Facebook has their stuff setup?
    – Jane Panda
    Jan 11, 2011 at 2:56
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    @bob the minute Twitter supports OAuth 2.0, we will add them, but not before. OAuth 1.0 is kind of nightmarish. Jan 11, 2011 at 9:55
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    @Bob - developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication documents Facebook OAuth. Its really, really simple. A basic consumer could probably be written in a dozen lines of code or so; ours is a bit bigger due to dealing with multiple domains (which is weird) and multiple deployment tiers (which is not so weird). Jan 11, 2011 at 12:20
  • @Jeff Understood, I've never used either version so I'll trust your judgement :) @Kevin Cool stuff, thanks for the link!
    – Jane Panda
    Jan 11, 2011 at 18:06
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    I'm pretty sure Twitter now does support oAuth 2.0, perhaps worth revisiting?
    – user50049
    Sep 19, 2013 at 11:36
  • +1 Cool information. I thought about this, however this is wealthy information. Thank you.
    – Praveen
    Sep 19, 2013 at 11:43
  • @TimPost They support application-only OAuth 2.0 (dev.twitter.com/docs/auth/application-only-auth), which is based on the Client Credentials Grant (tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749#section-4.4). Looks like enough though.
    – casperOne
    Sep 19, 2013 at 12:49

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