Twitter OAuth

Jay Logelin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:14:56 +0000

Today a few users have commented on the inability to join the site via our handy dandy twitter OAuth magic button thingy on the login screen. For those of you who don’t know/care what OAuth is, essentially it allows third party apps like FlockPoker use social networks like Twitter without demanding that the user login to the third-party site, thereby giving up their twitter passwords to potentially shady internet underbelly types. In my opinion A GREAT IDEA! I hate having to give up my Twitter User name and password to non-twitter sites. It just don’t feel right. In any case, I recall much toil and trouble integrating this very powerful feature into flock… much coffee and sleepless nights were part of the integration. Finally after getting it in there, the alpha users started to happily join in on the good times.

But wait. True to twitter’s fashion, the OAuth feature has now been disabled, as indicated by a beautifully rendered, neo-retro bird eying a bug. (presumably alluding to twitter’s desire to consume this huge feature fail.)

I can only assume that they are working on the problem, and will give it a couple days before I switch the app back to twitter login mode. boo.

Twitter, we love you. Just stop being so damn volatile.

Hello world!

Jay Logelin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:26:07 +0000

Well here we go. I have sent the alpha version of flock poker out into the wild. In all honesty it has been out there for about three weeks now and received a significant amount of fanfare for a pre-release( http://bit.ly/jPj4y and http://tinyurl.com/dbn7ql ).

I will start with a quick intro and then get into some of the motivations behind flock. You might ask yourself, “Great, just what the Internets needs, another f**king Poker application.” And, in truth, you would be correct. Online poker rooms have gotten a lot of bad press over the last 5 years. From shady accounting to questionable affiliate marketing tactics, even the biggest players in the online poker space play dirty. All to get your eyeballs and pocketbooks on their site.

It’s 2009. Microblogging is in full bloom with the advent of services like Twitter, Identi.ca, and Plurk. The “140 character revolution” has taken over the social web and is showing no sign of slowing down. So what are the Poker sites doing in response to the microblogging uprise? Or, for that matter the social media boom in general? Our idea was NOT to build another social network. There are already WAY too many social networks out there and convincing your pals to join another one just to enjoy a few rounds of poker just does not make sense. You’ve already got your friend / colleague / buddy / professional networks established on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Maybe the answer is to create a social application. OK, sure. The problem with a social app, is that you are still playing within the confines of your social net. The dream of Google’s OpenSocial is still in relative infantcy, and Facebook just won’t play nice with Google anyway. So we would have to cook up and maintain a different codebase for each one of the Social Networks and somehow try to manage and upgrade all of those systems. Might look something like this :

This is why we chose to build a poker app that puts the users in control. Flock Poker is a platform, not a site, designed to allow you to inject your own poker tables into your existing social network of friends via one simple link. It puts the power back into the users’ hands and lets you just have fun playing poker, without all of the headaches of rebuilding your social network.

I hope you like the public alpha. See you in the comments, or better yet, come see me at my table => http://flockpoker.com/beerme .

the flockpoker blog

Twitter OAuth

Hello world!