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joinauthenticationtwitterlinkedin-api

advantages joining a website using linked or twitter api

I am thinking about the join/login system in my next project, which will be a business platform.

I never used, as developer, linkedin or twitter api and i am asking what will be the advantages. Can you explain me theese steps?

1) In the join form i insert the possibility to join by using linked in or twitter api, in the second step i can take likendin or twitter account details to make the step faster, auto filling some input in the join forms (business address, name, surname, etc)

2) After correctly joined, the user already logged in linkedin or twitter is alredy logged in my site.

3) The user can update linkedin or twitter status from my site.

4) Is it ok if i want the user to give my site an email that probably is not the one inserted in linkedin and twitter?

5) do i have to build a linkedin app and a twitter app, don't i?

thanks a lot

Solution

  • You have two problems you are thinking about solving. The first is site authentication (question 1). Sounds like you want to use OpenID (same as StackOverflow does). That will allow you to get some basic information from whoever the OpenID provider is (LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, etc) (question 2). Then you will want to take that information and store it into a profile within your system. With that profile, you can save an additional email or other information specific to your site (question 4).

    As far as question 3, that will require you to register your app with Twitter and/or LinkedIn. This will give you shared secret tokens you can use to do OAuth authentication to get access to make API requests to these two services.

    I know that Google has a way to do OpenID and OAuth hybrid authentication so you can get both tokens in fewer steps than doing each one separately, but I don't know about LinkedIn or Twitter.

    The other thing to consider is. OpenID is great for consumer sites, or sites for individuals. But you mention that you are building a business platform. I don't know what that means, but if the goal is to have a Business to Business type operation, OpenID might not be the best choice.