Hacker News Reader

I was all ready to sign up as well, I do have a twitter account and I was still put off.

My twitter account is, like my facebook account and my google+ account, private to those whom I know and trust. why would I give that information to some random website?

I didn't sign up for this either (for same reason as you), and because I suspect some viral marketing at work.

My guess is that it is a version of the Flask-OAuth extension sample app, found here:

http://packages.python.org/Flask-OAuth/

Flask is really great, BTW.

It's just for authentication because you generate your own ep.io apps (I think that's what it's doing at least). If you look at the requested permissions, you will see that it doesn't need to read or write any of your data.

Why not just generate a unique token for each user then?