The lovely lovely diagram at https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/oauth-overview is worth a thousand words and errors.
Very useful if you are trying to coax rCurl to do the job for you.
Also a great slideshare in Japanese (no! Google Translate didnt work on pdf’s and slideshares and scribds (why!!) but still very lucid on using OAuth with R for Twitter.
Why use OAuth- you get 350 calls per hour for authenticated sessions than 150 calls .
I tried but failed using registerTwitterOAuth
There is a real need for a single page where you can go and see which social netowork /website is using what kind of oAuth, which url within that website has your API keys, and the accompanying R Code for the same. Google Plus,LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook all can be scraped better by OAuth. Something like this-