I believe the only difference is that the authenticate route could be used by only web based applications (ie they need to have a callback url) and allows for the force_login param. The authenticate can be used by either desktop or web apps, but do not support the force_login...but this may be changing soon.
>From themattharris earlier in the recent thread about the oauth permission change: "We support multiple accounts in our application, how do we force a login on the authorize flow?" Currently the only flow that supports the force_login parameter is / oauth/authenticate but adding it to /oauth/authorize flow is a good idea. We’ll begin working on this now and will let you know when it is released. On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Tyson Lowery <tysonlow...@gmail.com> wrote: > I can't seem to find the difference, does anyone know? > > Previous to the new permission system I sent my users to > http://twitter.com/oauth/authenticate/ > > But for some reason no matter what I do, it says at the bottom This > application will not be able to: > Access your private messages. > > So I changed to http://twitter.com/oauth/authorize. That solved the > problem about accessing private messages. But I'd like to force the > user to re-log into twitter. I can't figure out a way to do that with > authorize. > > I just need to solve one of these 2 problems. Any ideas? > > Thanks, > Tyson > > -- > Twitter developer documentation and resources: https://dev.twitter.com/doc > API updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/twitterapi > Issues/Enhancements Tracker: https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list > Change your membership to this group: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/twitter-development-talk > -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: https://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: https://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/twitter-development-talk