Sign In With Twitter? Twitter Connect?

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I am an admirer of both the social platforms available from Google and Facebook, implementing both Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect with this site. What I rate about both services is that they provide the ability to login using simple identity authentication and interact with the site and community. My preferred service is Facebook Connect as I can seamlessly connect my Facebook account and information with third party sites and send activity back to my newsfeed.

Is my preference about to change though as today there is a lot of discussion following an update to the Twitter API Wiki which indicates that Twitter are about to launch a Connect service. Sign in with Twitter is the pattern of authentication that allows users to connect their Twitter account with third-party services in as little is one click. It utilizes OAuth and although the flow is very similar, the authorization URL and workflow differs slightly -

The oauth/authenticate method will perform the following:

1. If the user is logged into Twitter.com and has already approved the calling application, the user will be immediately authenticated and returned to the callback URL.
2. If the user is not logged into Twitter.com and has already approved the calling application, the user will be prompted to login to Twitter.com then will be immediately authenticated and returned to the callback URL.
3. If the user is logged into Twitter.com and has not already approved the calling application, the OAuth authorization prompt will be presented. Authorizing users will then be redirected to the callback URL.
4. If the user is not logged into Twitter.com and has not already approved the calling application, the user will be prompted to login to Twitter.com then will be presented the authorization prompt before redirecting back to the callback URL.

Obviously the most important factor is the value provided by implementing each 'Connect' services authentication login.

Facebook Connect is still a relatively closed environment and it's not known whether Facebook will adopt open standards for their platform API. The advantage of Facebook Connect is the 200m + users, the ability to access a user’s social graph and profile data and the ability to submit activity back to the newsfeed.

Facebook Connect also has fairly robust privacy rules compared to Twitter that allows users to login to many third party Twitter applications/clients using their username and password. Twitter though doesn't have the extended permissions so is a lot more open compared to the more larger social network which has only recently begun opening the walled garden.

Is Sign In With Twitter another competitor to OpenID? Is it a Facebook Connect competitor? Personally I view Sign In With Twitter as the main competitor to Facebook Connect as other simple identity authentication services haven't really made a significant impact. I'm interested to see how this will develop and whether Twitter has potential or is just another pretender to Facebook's social networking crown!

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