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SuperTweet: Twitter without the OAuth hassle

20.10.2011
In 2008 (just as the U.S. economy began circling the drain) here in Gearhead about updating with , a free, , command line utility that allows you to transfer data with URL syntax using, and I quote, "DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP [along with] SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, [user name and password] authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, Kerberos ...), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks."

In short, cURL is a Swiss Army knife on steroids for data transfers over TCP/IP and is for just about any OS you can think of, which includes the usual suspects -- OS X, , -- as well as many others including Amiga, Syllable, VMS and z/OS.

So, way back in those heady days when we were all slowly but certainly losing our shirts, you could post a tweet using a command in the form of:

curl -u username:password -d status="I had a chicken sandwich for lunch" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

This method, using basic authentication, worked great and it was easy to arrange, for example, for your machines to use Twitter as a messaging system to let you know when they had problems or completed something. But on Aug. 30, 2010, Twitter stopped allowing access via basic authentication and switched to another method called or "Open Authentication."

BACKGROUND: