What Twitter access token should I use to automate tweets? - twitter

I would like to know what access token I require to achieve the following.
My Meteor app crawls various RSS feeds and makes a daily digest. I would like to automatically tweet about the daily digest when it is created, using the app's Twitter account.
As I see, in the doc, it seems that I need to use application owner access token and create my app using the app's Twitter account. Is this a correct approach?

Yes, that's correct. It's quite simple too.
Go to Twitter Apps and login with your regular twitter account
assuming you have one, if not you need to create one.
Once signed in click on Create New App button.
Fill out the application (Name, description, and whatever else it requires).
Create your key and access tokens. Share those with users that you trust as they'll be used to access the twitter API to read/write information.
Give the application you created a "Read and Write" permission based on what you asked in the question.
Then depending on the software/language you use there's a plenty of existing packages that can help you access and obtain the information from the API.

Related

Linkedin access token for application that doesn't require a member to login

Our application can show rich links to webpages. So instead of a mere weblink we show a short summary and a picture. We used to use embed.ly's extract api to supply us with this data, but since they have changed their terms and pricing we have implemented an alternative solution.
The problem we find is that linkedin profile urls cannot be assessed by our new solution. Embedly was able to give us all the details we needed from a linkedin profile url (including the user's picture), but we don't seem to have access to that information without going through linkedin's API.
This call gives us all the data we are looking for:
GET https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/url=[PROFILE_URL]:(id,email-address,first-name,last-name,headline,summary,formatted-name,picture-url,picture-urls::(original),site-standard-profile-request,public-profile-url)?format=json&oauth2_access_token=[TOKEN]
Where [PROFILE_URL] is a linked in profile url and [TOKEN] is the oauth2 access token.
There are two issues that I have:
Our application does not ask users to authenticate through linkedin, so we do not have a user oauth2 access token available;
Linkedin's suggestion in their FAQ (https://developer.linkedin.com/support/faq) seems very daft:
Can I get an access token for my application that doesn't require a member to login?
We do not provide access tokens for applications that are not associated with a particular LinkedIn member.
If your application requires you to make API calls in an automated way - without user interaction, you need to bootstrap the first access token request by manually signing in, and then ensure that your application refreshes the token automatically prior to expiry to avoid the need for additional human authentication.
Now... four questions:
a. Has anyone implemented option [2] in a production setting?
b. If yes, what are the limitations, downsides etc. Is this really the best and safest solution?
c. Is there any alternative that allows me to authenticate the application itself with its mighty client key and client secret?
d. Is there anyone from linkedin monitoring this? If yes, can you contact me?
Cheers, Raymond

Do I need OAuth2.0 to create a google account through the Admin SDK API?

Currently using the Provisioning API that is being depreciated April 20.
This is the current flow:
user (University Alumni) gets to our site http://alumni.columbia.edu/email
they click on Create My Account
they authenticate through our university WIND system using what we call their UNI
they land on a page mentioning that an email account UNI#caa.columbia.edu is ready to be created. They can pick an alias to UNI. They also need to enter a password to use the Chat and POP-mail features of Gmail.
they confirm the creation of the account. At this point the API is being called using https://www.google.com/a/feeds/, some data (email address, name, id) being saved in our database.
To log in, they come through our site, click on the login button, this will use the SSO and they get logged in.
Based on the flow above, do I need to use OAuth2.0?
Yes, you will need to authenticate with OAuth using the Installed Applications approach to do this. Instead of step 5 the way you currently have it, you'll need to call the API from a process on your server with an account that has (limited) admin credentials that can create the account with the Directory API. To do this, you'll need to persist the OAuth token information that the account will use to connect, and handle the code to refresh the token when it has expired.
The first time you run your code you'll need to manually authenticate that account to get your application the appropriate permissions so that they can be stored.
If you're hoping to not go too crazy with handling the authentication side of things and you're using .Net, I'd recommend checking out my project gShell that acts as a wrapper for the authentication and handles the token storing and refreshing for you. It's still a young project but it should fit your needs. Alternately, feel free to browse the code for an example on what to do.
If you plan on using Python, check out Google Apps Manager by jay0lee which is also a wonderful resource.

How to access Dropbox API via Oauth?

I have about a site with about 50 customers. They each have a user profile. They want to be able to automatically include their images which they store on DropBox in their profiles.
My idea is to make a Dropbox api that scans their folders (with their permission) and just include the images in their profile. I already know how to link directly to their images as long as I have the url.
I set up the Ruby API. Only question is : Do they have to authorize my app every time I try to access their images?
I want to somehow store authorization information for each client, then just reuse that info and access their images through the Ruby API. Is this possible? How is it done?
I think if I can just get past this authorization hurdle I can take care of the rest.
You can definitely do this. Just store the access token at the end of the OAuth flow and reuse it. From https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/start/ruby:
The access token is all you'll need to make API requests on behalf of
this user, so you should store it away for safe-keeping (even though
we don't for this tutorial). By storing the access token, you won't
need to go through these steps again unless the user reinstalls your
app or revokes access via the Dropbox website.

Retrieving and displaying third party Facebook statuses in iOS app

I'm new to Facebook development and I'm running into trouble with what seems like it should be an easy task. I am building an iOS app for a client, and that client wants to display a number of their most recent status updates in the app, along with a link to their Facebook page. These statuses should be displayed to the user of the app even if they are not logged into Facebook or do not have a Facebook account saved on their device.
My research so far seems to indicate that I'll need to make a request to the Graph API using a user access token (which I can do successfully in the app using a token copied and pasted from the Graph API Explorer), but it seems that the only way to get a user access token from within the app is to log the user of the app into Facebook using their account credentials. This is not a good solution because I need to be able to display the client's statuses to the user whether they have are logged into a Facebook account or not. Is such a thing possible, and if so, how? I've been all over the docs and can't find a conclusive answer either way.
I know that we would approach it quite differently. We would have our own web service periodically pull what we needed off of google and store it on our own server, then we would use AFHTTPClient to pull this information down to our app. That way we wouldn't have to spoof anything with FaceBook or put any requirments on our users, such as logging into facebook. It would require that you have a service that your client maintains (or you could easily contract that for a cost).

Twitter API: Separate read and read/write tokens

On my site users should be able to authenticate using their twitter account. Another optional feature is, that users should be able to have tweets sent in their name on certain events.
For this I've setup the twitter application to be read & write.
My problem now is, when a user is using twitter to authenticate, then he is automatically also granting read/write permissions. But I'd like to leave it up to the user to decide at a later stage if he trusts me enough, to grant me this permission..
I can't find any setting/parameter in the api which would allow this split. The only solution I can currently see, is splitting the twitter app into two: One read-only app for authentication and one read-write app for tweeting etc.
Send users to https://api.twitter.com/oauth/authorize?oauth_token=xyz and add a parameter of oauth_access_type with a value of read. That should restrict that particular user to read only permissions.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/twitter-development-talk/1P765h9ecBk

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