How to post to someone's FaceBook / Twitter w/o their password (but with their permission)?

Question

I don't use either FaceBook or Twitter, so I am somewhat hampered here.

A friend is going on a once in a life-tine yacht journey and their will be a satellite modem which reports latitude/longitude (and some more data) data on a regular basis. This data gets stored in a database, to which I will have access.

My friend wants to Face/Tweet updates, hopefully with a Google Maps map. He doesn't want to give me his passwords as that would give me full access and let me read his private stuff.

I quite understand that, but what are my options? Obviously, the APIs to FaceTweet won't allow me to post without (his) credentials. Can I create accounts of my own and he can then configure his FaceTweet to say "anything that gets posted there, I want to post it on my site too"? Does Face/Tweet offer such a facility?

The alternative seems to be to code a desktop app to scan the database regularly and post new updates using his password which he must enter into the app, so the app must run on his home PC.

Of course, that is not perfect; if his home PC crashes when he is away then the updates will cease. If it runs on my server, then no problem, but he doesn't want to give me his password and lives too far away to come here and type it in himself.

Can anyone advise me as to how best to implement this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For Facebook you will have to create an application with "Post on your behalf" permission.

Update:

For Twitter it's much trickier: you will have to deal with OAuth tokens to access someone's account after you ask user to authenticate. Here is a fine article on that. You will have to press some free PDF download on our members page and it will ask for you e-mail, but you can press cancel and it redirects you to article anyway.