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Comment by paulnelligan | Hacker News Reader

I attempted to sign in to ask a question, and got the following message:

This application will be able to:

    Read Tweets from your timeline.
    See who you follow, and follow new people.
    Update your profile.
    Post Tweets for you.
    Access your direct messages until June 30th, 2011.

Who the in their right mind would sign into this ???

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I couldn't find a way to ask for fewer permissions. All we need is ability to post tweets since there's a checkbox to post to your followers when you ask a question or start an AMA.

We don't use any of the other permissions and won't do anything unexpected.

For what it's worth, we've run the Graffiti app on Facebook since the launch of the platform, and have never spammed anyone or their friends, or misused any data or permissions.

Why don't you let them tweet with a simple "tweet this" button instead? Why can't you just put in a tweet this button in a notice that appears after they post?

Hi Tim

I wasn't actually expecting a personalised response from the AnyAsq creator.

It was more a general comment, and the question still stands I think - read my DM's?, no frickin' way!! - that's a serious invasion of privacy ...

I understand that you have to do what you can to spread your product, but there's a trade-off between being able to tweet, and asking someone to basically give up their twitter accounts to you ... you're going to lose more potential customers than gain with this method IMHO ...

How about: asking someone to sign in twitter, and asking their permission to just tweet their questions? - could you limit it to that ?

I appreciate the feedback, and we're still thinking about how best to do it. I'm hoping at some point twitter will implement a more granular way to ask for permissions.

As for direct messages, I believe twitter will stop asking for that either today or tomorrow.

I'm super surprised they haven't implemented it already, i mean, it's not that difficult to build a granular permission system, what they have in place right now is a disaster ...

I'm wondering if they might be planning to transition to a more granular permission system like Facebook, since they recently started displaying the permissions more granularly and it would make a lot of sense.

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