Twitter API: allow authenticated user to post tweets on another user's behalf

Question

Twitter API allows to update "the authenticating user’s current status", as explained in the documentation page.

What I'd like to achieve instead is to update another user's current status. Consider a magazine's twitter account. I'd like different people to be able to update the magazine's status. Tweetdeck allows this, but it also allows a whole lot of other things like access to Direct Messages. I only want to provide certain authenticated users an interface (similar to Twitter's post-a-tweet interface) to post status and images to the shared account.

I could not find a simple explanation of how to use Twitter API to achieve the above functionality. Could someone please help?

Answer 1

If you have an app that implements the status update API and it is delivered to different people and they authorize the app with the magazine's twitter account, then the app will update that status. I can show an example also with code if this is what you're asking. However the main point is that, once a user has authorized the app, she/he doesn't need to be connected with the shared login any longer because the app will do that on the magazine's behalf. BTW, similar question here: Twitter API: post on behalf of whom?

Edit

Just to summarize the comments:

The standard OAuth authentication requires the following main steps 1) to develop an app (registered with OAuth consumer key and secret) that implements the API update status 2) to install and authorize the app: during this step the onwer will be requested to enter the credentials of the passive account in a Twitter link opened with the browser, 3) then - after a fallback - the app will store the access token and any user of the app will be able to update the status without login

Once you have developed an app that can post tweets on behalf of a passive twitter account using the standard OAuth, you could make that functionality available to the authenticated users of a website.