Desde hoy, 31 de agosto, Twitter solamente permitirá la autentificación a su API via OAuth. Esto significa que si tu aplicación para Twitter necesitaba que le des tanto el username como el password y se conectaba via una autentificación básica esta ya no podra funcionar. Deberas utilizar sólo OAuth, lo cual trae demasiadas ventajas a los desarrolladores ya que estos no tienen que preocuparse por si el usuario cambio tanto de username como de password.

Este cambio en su API le llaman el “OAuthcalypse”. Para ver los sitios a los que estamos conectados debemos ir a Preferencias -> Conecciones ( http://twitter.com/settings/connections ). Esta website nos da las horas restantes para este cambio:

On August 31st, 2010 ( from now), the @twitterapi team will be shutting off all basic authentication on the Twitter API — you can see the announcement here (and, this has been previously announced). All applications, by this date, need to switch to using OAuth. Don’t fret! @twitterapi is here to help! Feel free to reach out to us directly, or via our Twitter Development Talk group.

The switch to OAuth is a good thing! You, as the application developer,

don’t have to worry about exposing the credentials for your users whether through a bug or other means (especially considering that a lot of people use the same password for multiple services);
don’t have to worry about the user changing their password — a user can change his or her password and the OAuth «connection» to your app will still work;
don’t have to worry about other applications masquerading as your application – only you can set the byline with your application name;
will eventually have access to more APIs from Twitter that will only be available to «trusted» OAuth-enabled applications; and
give the @twitterapi team more visibility into the network — you help us plan for capacity, and you help us squash spam and you help us identify bugs.
Just to review what will be happening:

beginning on August 17th, 2010, basic auth rate limits will decrease by 15 requests/hour on each week day;
on August 19th, 2010 at 5pm PDT, basic auth will be shut off temporarily for 10 minutes;
on August 23rd, 2010 at 8am PDT, basic auth will be shut off temporarily for 10 minutes;
on August 26rd, 2010 at 5pm PDT, basic auth will be shut off temporarily for 10 minutes; and
on August 31st, 2010 at 8am PDT, all basic auth requests will be served with a HTTP 401 error code.