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My girlfriend described protocols to me as "it's like everyone agrees to speak the same language and then you can communicate". Which is a great way to describe it.

When you have to agree to API terms / "rules of the road" in Twitter's legalease / or revocable oauth tokens, things stop being a free language.

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Yes, but without these rules, there would be people spamming everyone uncontrollably and wasting resources. Anything with this level of users needs these kinds of rules in place or he service eventually becomes useless.

The oath tokens are there because too many developers don't seem to understand good security practices when storing usernames and passwords

In the same way spam made email useless?

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