Discuss: Twitter OAuth Comes to Second Life

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I think this is a great idea. Any effort that creates more ease in integrating or accessing the cotemporary social usage of the web is a good direction. Thanks!

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I grabbed this when it first was set out by Babbage. Suddenly it gets blogged? has it been updated or something? Just a little surprised to see this getting blog time.

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Twittering within SL isn't anything new, really. In the old Script Library forum, there was a "Twitter Update" script where all you have to do is prefix a line of chat with "tw " and it didn't need to use OAuth. And with a few extra lines, the script could also be used for Identi.ca too.

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Aliselia.Aeon wrote:

You have to be kidding. That is the last thing I would ever want in SL. I hate that SL is becoming so involved in the social networking crap. I came to SL to get away from the "real world" and LL keeps forcing it into SL.

In my opinion this is destroying the SL I care about. *sighs*

You have no idea what this post actually said do you?

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o.0

Serves no purpose for me sorry, other than the annoyance of the total focus on social networking stuff.

>> Virtual world << - >>Second Life <<

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I really don't understand why SL has such a fascination with the social networking sites.

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Translation: I hate Twitter and Facebook. If I wanted to be involved with them I still would be.

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Cool! Thanks!

Now please also give solve WEB-1074 because I'm tired of reading trolls, people who whine all the time, don't provide constructive feedback and never appreciates how this platform evolves. Let me filter information as I need.

By the way I use Twitter every day to find and to spread interesting and useful information about Second Life.

Have a read / follow me:
twitter.com/oobscure

Follow Linden Lab employees:
twitter.com/oobscure/lindenlab

Lots of interesting Second Life residents:
twitter.com/oobscure/secondlife

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I can think of ONE (yes, exactly one) meaningful application:

my psyke security orb sending a tweet when it boots an intruder.

oh, wait, it does that already.

nothing to see here.

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This was not about "Twittering within SL", it was about OAuth providing more security.

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That's fine. I'm not a big fan of them either. But let me present you with some facts.

For people like you and me who are indifferent to twitter:

Before OAuth in SL: not "forced" to do anything.

After OAuth in SL: not "forced" to do anything.

For people who like twitter:

Before OAuth in SL: "forced" to use twitter insecurely or not at all.

After OAuth in SL: can now use twitter securely.

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I'd like this sort of thing better if I could use it without ever having to see the source code.

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I like how almost all the replies have missed the point. It's pretty funny. (not that I should be surprised)

What this  means (as you may have read)
is that you can now let people  Tweet from within Second Life in a safe
and secure way, without having  to set up external Web servers, and
without requiring Residents to  re-enter credentials if they want to
use Twitter from inworld.

This is for content developers. You are not being forced to use Twitter in any way what-so-ever.

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woooot,

I don't understand the reaction of these people, its not twitter you have to look at, this is merely an example of how to use OAuth, it opens up a whole branch of possibility, Oauth code is open source, you can get it in a wide variety of languages from C++, JAVA, PHP, and so on, you can implement the technology into your own website and get a secure authenticated connection established, you can create your own local web server at home, secure a connection with second life, and build a desktop application on top of that.

I know, there are plenty other ways to do that, but this could set the standard to securely authenticate to the outside world for future projects.

I would say, forget about Twitter, think about all the other possibility's!

Great job LL....

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on

I'm on vacation from SL for a while, but this is awesome. Cool beans for added security!

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I wonder how Prok will construe this as greifer/copybotter tool.

Thanks for all the hard work on this, guys. I have no use for it, but I'm sure there are those that do.

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Twitter = Crap. Nobody needs that. It's only for people who think they are that important they need to communicate all sorts of nonsense to the Web.

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Thank you, SteveR, for cutting to the chase.

I'm currently a Second Life addict AND a Twitter addict, so this security improvement is beneficial to me.

Those who don't want to use it, just don't. I don't understand the complaining. I remember when Voice was being added and people objected. Folks like my father, who had debilitating Parkinson's disease and could no longer type fast enough to keep up with chat, needed Voice to be added. Unfortunately SL Voice came too late to perk up Dad's final years, but I did get really angry at the nondisabled Slers who were all "don't add an option for Voice because *I* don't need it." Same weird whining here.

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This sentence here "A dance machine might send an update saying that a resident is dancing at at a particular location in Second Life..." had me thinking what are the safeguards in place that not sexbeds and such starts twittering not only that you use the bed, but what poses and who you might be intimate with. Sounds like it could be a pretty embarrasing scenario developing.

Are there built in mechanism to ensure that, unless I actively approve the tweet, a scripted device cannot start gossiping on what I do?

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That's a good question, however something to remember is that nothing about this automatically links you to any sort of personal information unless you choose to.

Depending on how such an object is set up there's a couple ways for it to "tweet" about you. The first way is that you authorize it to use your account. If the object should abuse this privileage you can simply deauthorize it. The other option is that the object could post to someone else's account. If that's the case then there's nothing different about this from other types of scripts that might communicate with the outside world.

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Actually... Facebook does that. Twitter allows virtual IDs. (^_^)y

twitter.com/FriggnImmy =^-^=

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I use Twitter to monitor grid status updates and keep up with the little nothings my friends do. (^_^)

...

... AND, to put out yet another picture of my virtual butt on the interwebs. =^-^=

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Looking at the possibilities of this, I've knocked up a quick'n'dirty "tweet your visits" tool that, when installed on your land, lets any visitors tweet the news of their visit via their own account. And it should only require them to authorize it for the first one they ever use.

More here: http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2010/03/im-here-for-second-life.html (a.k.a. the URL on this post)

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Thanks @Athanius. This is great.

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I have to agree. If I want to tweet, I'll go to Twitter. Second Life is supposed to be about interacting in a virtual 3D world, not interacting with real life 2D crap like Facebook and Twitter. I have a feeling that LL is shooting itself in the foot. I don't even know why I waste time posting on these stupid forums... Lindens don't listen! This is a fact, if you've read the many complaints on blog posts about items that haven't worked for years that people are still complaining about you'd come to the same conclusion. Lindens don't listen!

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I like how almost all the replies have missed the point. It's pretty funny. (not that I should be surprised)

LOL yes! HMAC that works is a big help all alone.

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If you read this thread and substitute "Blue Mars" for "Twitter" - it would be the same.

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I just see this as another instance of LL trying to integrate the so called real life into SL. RL is exactly what I went to SL to get away from.

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Irony much?

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Stever.Whiplash wrote:

I like how almost all the replies have missed the point. It's pretty funny. (not that I should be surprised)

You're missing something as well, but it's not funny.

That LL is increasingly interested in Twitter and Facebook is not a good thing. It's a sign that they don't understand what they have and how it's superior. It's worrisome because it indicates that LL may be heading in the wrong direction.

Also, I doubt that Twitter and Facebook are spending as much time trying to send their users elsewhere as LL is doing.

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Hey, I just wanted to congratulate you on being named after one of my all-time favorite albums!

=)

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Twitter from SL is very very old and it did not come from Linden Lab. It came and it was used and Second Life did not crumble away. OAuth is the new thing.

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See Babbage's demo on Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_19cl8qOZKA

As many pointed out, the biggest win in OAuth solution is that you don't have to store your twitter credentials in scripts, you authenticate with twitter direcly.

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Cerise.Sorbet wrote:

Twitter from SL is very very old and it did not come from Linden Lab. It came and it was used and Second Life did not crumble away. OAuth is the new thing.

I understand the distinction, but I am tired of hearing of Twitter and Facebook rather than SL.

It would be great if Wallace and M could make the effort to give equal time to SL.

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@Ellie Thanks! Would you believe on my second day in SL I met Harry Nilsson's son's girlfriend?

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Kind of ironic the items he used for his demo. Isn't gambling banned in SL?

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The problem with this stuff, is not whether or not we have a choice to use it. The problem comes when those who don't choose to use it, interact with people who do. Just yesterday I was told I must have something to hide, because I wouldn't get on stickcam in a welcome area. SL has went from "build your own world", to "where in the world are you, where are your photos, live videos feeds and photo ID?". I don't go to Twitter to build houses, I don't go to SL to tell the world what color my underwear is. Sorry, I guess I'm not in the popular generation now, but my generation pays the bills.

All this real world blending is going to cause more discrimination than "voice" does now. I don't use voice all the time, because it's annoying and I crash every time I TP, unless I turn it off first. But if I go somewhere and don't turn it on, I'm accused of being a woman with a man avatar. It's already taken for granted that any female avatar not on voice, is a man. So I can just imagine how this is going to turn out in a year or so.

Once again, it's nice to have choices, but the problem is going to be the discrimination. If LL wants to be involved in social networking, why can't they start another grid or world for that?

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by

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I agree completely.

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by

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I understand the distinction, but I am tired of hearing of Twitter and Facebook rather than SL.

It would be great if Wallace and M could make the effort to give equal time to SL.

And there it is. You're here to complain simply because you're tired of hearing about facebook and twitter. You may not like it, but facebook and twitter are two of the most popular things on the internet. LL would be pretty dumb to completely ignore them. Especially when these sort of integration possibilities exist.

They're not trying to force you to use facebook or twitter. They're not trying to herd people you to those sites. LL wants everyone to use their product. One great way to do that is to provide _optional_ integration to and from extremely popular sites/apps/whatever. Just remember, it's optional.

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I personally think the idea of twitter being inworld is a bad idea. Second life was created to immerse yourself in a virtual world, is this correct? Maybe if said person was 15 years old and like to tell the world "I just went to the bathroom","I just got up",or "I am beautiful" is would be fine but for a adult platform.....no.

With that said, maybe this tweeter would be a good idea for the teen grid. It would be fitting with all their text messaging instead of real interaction with their peers.

Twitter is a fad that in a couple years it will just be in a book of facts at the library somewhere. It's great Wallace that LL is looking to add new features but twitter in my opinion is not the right direction. The resident interaction should be done inworld and using any platform like twitter would make one wonder what Second Life is for. We could just stay offline and twit what we "would" do if we were inworld.

Maybe I am too old.... I am 35 and probaly don't get it. I don't feel I am behind the times though....I still buy all the latest gadgets and have more traffic on our home network than is on the main street in front of the house.

I mean no disrespect to you Wallace..I am just showing my opinion.

My thought for the day "Just because you can....does'nt make it a good idea"

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Not a bad idea, I do use twitter but am not really bothered how I access it and I would probably never use OAuth

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Opensource.Obscure schrieb:

This was not about "Twittering within SL", it was about OAuth providing more security.

Thank God - I'm still fed up enough about the plans to connect such dataminers like Facebook to SL

From Wikipedia:

OAuth is an open protocol that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.

OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of usernames and passwords to their data hosted by a given service provider. Each token grants access to a specific site (e.g. a video editing site) for specific resources (e.g. just videos from a specific album) and for a defined duration (e.g. the next 2 hours).

Thus OAuth allows a user to grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data.

It is analogous to using a credit card and signing for a transaction in a restaurant, rather than handing over your ATM card and giving your pin to the waiter.

OAuth is a complementary but distinct service to OpenID.

Waitwaitwait - in plain english please

Why the heck should we ever need THAT in SL?or, why shuld SL need that?

I see no point to have this function in SL - or I'm just no computer nerd enough to grasp the necessity for a function (in SL) that " allows a user to grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data.". Is that just another step to the full Facebookization of SL? Or do I misunderstand something here?

When I want to show someone a picture, I either hand them the texture (or the snapshot), or put it on a prim. If I want to show someone a video I send them the link, or use my TV or the mediatexture - so what is actually the use of this OAuth within SL? and why forwarding contact cards? I have no CONTACT list in SL, I have a (though pretty short) FRIENDS list. - and even suggest others to contact them, I tell the names but don't give "contact cards" away.I think SL is easy and laidback enough to actually make contact without having been given a card....

so, what is the use of this OAUTH, in plain English please, for non-nerds?

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Stever.Whiplash schrieb:

I understand the distinction, but I am tired of hearing of Twitter and Facebook rather than SL.

It would be great if Wallace and M could make the effort to give equal time to SL.

And there it is. You're here to complain simply because you're tired of hearing about facebook and twitter. You may not like it, but facebook and twitter are two of the most popular things on the internet. LL would be pretty dumb to completely ignore them. Especially when these sort of integration possibilities exist.

They're not trying to force you to use facebook or twitter. They're not trying to herd people you to those sites. LL wants everyone to use their product. One great way to do that is to provide _optional_ integration to and from extremely popular sites/apps/whatever. Just remember, it's optional.

Facebook is the biggest dataminer on the internet (which is awful enough in itself), even allowing hideous folks to spy out personal info of its users -and use that against them or for crap advertising; and twitter is just a kindergarden-level micromessage spam tool - why should LL even WANT to be involved with such stuff? LL is already dumb enough to NOT ignore them totally.

As I see it, LL makes one step back down from its superior stand after another. The one and only really useful and helpful implementation LL has done this year was the possibility to easily transfer L$ from the SL account to the Xstreet account.

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From the blog post:

Why We Call Ourselves Team Pixie Dust

Answer: Because LL devs are always away with the faries perhaps.

Why not fix the old issues first especially when this as has been said already been in SL for sometime.

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When is there gonna be a SVC-22 team?!

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-22

SVC-22 celebrated its 3rd birthday last month....

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Twitter (and Facebook) - completely overrated in my opinion. Next LL will be wanting to incorporate Farmville and other such stimulating social games inside SL. Just what we need.

And I agree with Seven, I doubt Twitter and Facebook are working on ways to include/promote SL on their pages.

You can't be everything to everybody - what'll be next - MySpace iTunes .......

I understand that including Twitter inside SL is a form of advertising - Twitter is very popular,and probably LL hope that word will spread about SL, due to increased numbers of SL residents "promoting" SL though Twitter and Facebook. We possibly can look forward to Twitter users entering SL in the foreseeable future and an increase in the number of already pointless tweets!!

Lots can be said for the "marketing" aspect and why Twitter is being incorporated, but for now, this will do.

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Ok, hmm, so my comments on this...

90% of all people that replied haven't understood the original post. I have no idea if the article was deliberately misleading for non-programmers (i.e. the ones looking at the Wiki page and not having a clue about what the matter is) and just worded to be specifically linked to by external sources to show how cool it is to programme in LSL.

When I read this, I was surprised — what does it mean, Twitter OAuth comes to Second Life? Do we get new LSL functions to tie specifically into Twitter OAuth? And if so, why? Getting generic OAuth support directly on the LSL library would have been nice; getting direct HMAC support would have been nicer; but, oh well, if we get direct Twitter OAuth support, I guess it might be good enough, although I would have certainly recommended to develop more generic library functions that might be reused for other purposes...

But when looking at the code... I saw that there was none of this There are no new LSL library functions. Instead, there is just cleverly written LSL, and kudos to the team that does cool LSL wizardry. Yes, implementing HMAC on plain old LSL is very hard, and a tough exercise even for a professional programmer. Hooray, congrats, applause. But... yes, well, so what? There are a gazillion of other very-hard-to-implement functions in LSL, and they have never received such attention by the Lab, worth a blog post. This kind of show off of obscure and arcane programming "sk1llz" would be better posted on, say, the LSL Wiki's Script Library, where similar complex-to-implement features have been around for a long time — like, say, wizardry that allows Bezier curves to be plotted in 3D inside SL.

Oh, sure, I know — plotting Bezier curves inside SL will just appeal to a math geek. On the other hand, showing off how cool HMAC was implemented on LSL will just appeal to programming geeks (don't get me wrong, I always appreciate to read code for difficult-to-implement things, which give me the cozy feeling that there are so many bright people out there with lots and lots of spare time to figure this out!).

So, mmh, in all fairness... what were the requirements to get this type of geekness worth an official blog post? Is a new trend going to be started, "cool things that have been implemented in LSL which will be picked up by the media"? How does anyone apply? I mean, there are gazillions of insanely cool things implemented out there. Some might even have the same level of impact, like, mmmh, say, interfacing with SMS gateways or directly sending wire transfers by communicating with a bank? Selling real products via SL by interfacing with an ordering system and a warehouse? Others might also appeal to the social networking side of SL that has been recently so much revamped, like, say, SL Blips, something which ought to have been developed by LL when they bought Avatars United but was actually created by MSo Lambert?

Or is it just promoting "exceptionally hard algorithms implemented in LSL" to prove that LSL is a "serious" language? Babbage Linden and Eggy Lippmann have in the past implemented the A* algorithm in LSL, if I'm not mistaken; it's as geeky (and impossible to grasp for non-programmers) as implementing HMAC. Shouldn't they get their own blog post, too? And I'm sure that universities out there who already give their courses in LSL as an "introductory" programming language (as opposed to, say, Pascal...) might also have some very cool, geeky implementations to show.

So what was the criterium to pick on HMAC + OAuth implementation as an example? If I do a OpenID implementation in LSL, will I get kudos too? Or directly implementing a PayPal gateway (without an intermediate web server) to allow residents to buy items inside SL with US$ and Euros instead of L$? I might have a long list of similar "difficult to implement" algorithms, which are actually useful, if I know that LL is going to promote them as much as HMAC-on-LSL.

As some have pointed out, "Twitter in SL" is not new. Using an intermediate server to deal with the incredible workarounds that LSL requires is a far better engineering approach — I have no idea how long it took to implement Twitter OAuth in LSL, but creating a front-end to an intermediate server to implement the same thing takes about, what, half an hour? I'm a slow programmer, so my own first attempt took me about 2 hours — but my own HUD connects to 50 services at the same time and not just Twitter. And it's just a handful of lines of code. That's the difference between engineering — finding the optimal solution, i.e. the one that is simplest to implement, takes the least time to implement, but has the most robustness — and pure computer science research, which gives more fascinating things to play with, but is not necessarily an optimal solution (HMAC in LSL is slow!).

I would be far more impressed if Babbage had given us a hmac() function inside the LSL library instead of implementing it in LSL

Now, for the ones worried that this announcement will take away even more freedom from you, and expose further details of your real life to the nasty profilers at Twitter... peace! Integration with Twitter has been done eons ago, and people are using it for a long, long time — as well as integration with Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, GTalk, and whatever other social tool you care to name (yes, even Avatars United!). The BlogHUD, for instance, has been incredibly popular. I routinely take snapshots to send them to Flickr and other tools, directly from within SL; and some do the same to send them to their own blogs or Facebook pages. There is nothing "new" about that; it's truly old news. If you aren't using any of those HUDs it's just because you haven't felt the need for them; but a quick search on the Web will get you dozens, if not hundreds, of similar things. So this cute library is not adding anything new to what already existed. It's just show-off — showing how bright LSL programmers can be by implementing obscure, arcane functions using a language that was designed to reply to touch events on plywood cubes. Sure, they deserve respect and admiration for what they have managed to do. And who knows, perhaps LL might open up a new way to promote LSL programmers — call it the "Geeky LSLers" and offer a prize for the most geekish implementation in LSL of the month, and get the word out. After all, other companies — say, Auttomatic, the company behind WordPress, but there are billion others — do that all the time. They like to show off what their clients or users have come up with in ultimate geekishness. That's not bad in itself.

Perhaps the hype was the only "bad" thing about all this. If the article was named, "HMAC implemented for OAuth by clever LSL programmers", nobody would have read it — except computer scientists and programming teachers who would find it an amazing example of what can be done in LSL. Put the word "Twitter" on the title, and it starts attracting attention. Write on the body of the article that this will allow SL items to post status and information directly on Twitter — as if it's something new... — and all of a sudden this becomes "news".

I'd really suggest to move these kinds of articles into a new section or blog, like http://geekworld.secondlife.com, where they might be more appreciated for the skill in implementing these algorithms? And ask LSL programmers to submit their latest innovative uses of LSL to contribute to it? I'm sure it would be immensely popular by that specific community. Here, it gets completely misunderstood.

Oh, and while I'm at it, can we ask Babbage to implement hmac() as a standard LSL library function? Now that would have been just the thing to have...

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Hey guys,

Any source codes non-XStreetSL for us teen folk?

Would be greatly appreciated,

Caerus

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Discuss: Twitter OAuth Comes to Second Life