And yet every Twitter account has an email address attached to it, and Twitter knows if it’s been verified or not. The ‘identity’ argument seems pedantic. It’s a fact that OAuth is used by most sites primarily as a means to register/login users based on trusted third parties like Facebook and Google.
A simple change to Twitter’s OAuth procedures to allow the user to share their email address would mean a ton of sites would start putting Twitter in front of a bunch of eyeballs.
It seems like pure insanity to me that Twitter would go this route.
Even if I view this through the lens I use to view Twitter’s other seemingly-crazy decisions – like kicking third-party client developers squarely in the nuts – I cannot make heads nor tails of it. At least that decision I can understand, if you realize that Twitter’s goal is to control how people view Twitter, so they can control ad views.
But this? Makes. No. Sense.
Most sites out there that want to support registration right now are going to offer Facebook and Google, but not Twitter, because we don’t want to deal with requesting/validating email ourselves, nor put our users through the headache of doing it for yet another service. It just creates another barrier to entry.
