Recently I was working on adding "Send to Twitter" and "Send to Facebook" functionality for a friends site and realized that the standard hyperlinks to the respective share pages was far from ideal - especially considering this site was intended to be viewed on an iPad by a wide audience; not a desktop experience with just a singular user. In my research for how to make this experience more streamlined I read through pages of Facebook API's and Twitter's@Anywhere looking for a solution. Turns out, there is no way to authenticate a user without a pop-up window.

I understand that for security purposes this makes sense but didn't we already wage the war against pop-up windows? Did they win? How is there not an authenticated method using a secure iframe experience so that no new windows need appear?

Jed points out that with the forthcoming iOS5 this may be made easier but I have my doubts. Facebook has iOS Integration but the methodology isn't available to web users. I assume the iOS Twitter integration will be much the same - native apps can access it but not websites.

This is frustrating to say the least but I am curious if anyone has found workarounds for it? Or maybe knows of a different way to authenticate? Have we really decided that pop-up windows are our best bet?