We've been using Twitter auth for all of our apps at @makeshiftHQ just out of convenience; some rely on it for core functionality more than others.
In the case of HireMyFriend we put in Twitter auth as a precursor to building a 'secretly DM your friends' feature that hasn't shipped yet.
That said - with an app based around your anonymity but the social presence of your friends & professional contacts I think this would work well for a developer without a social media presence. We'll consider adding email/password sign up in the coming weeks — I'm sure you appreciate how busy launches are :)
Have you considered integrating with LinkedIn as well?
As a complete tangent I'm presently looking for jobs literally on the other side of the world, in a country where I know nobody (so I guess I'm not your target market?). The site used most often there is SEEK. On their own I doubt services like yours would integrate with SEEK or similar smaller international jobs sites. However I'd love to see some kind of social networking standard take off where once you've integrated with say LinkedIn, integrating with someone like SEEK would literally be as simple as swapping a couple of API keys. It'd be even better if the integration could be bidirectional. That is, SEEK could decide to integrate with HMF or vice-versa and whatever features would just "magically" show up on both sites so long as both approved the integration.
Shit, that's kind of like a meta-friend request. "Hey there! My social network wants to be friends with your social network!" Weird.
I obviously can't answer for the author, but in my own endeavors I've used social auth as a quick fix and said "eh, if it takes off I'll go back and do it right." Chances are the subsegment of his market without a social presence is small.
Authentication and marketing are big hairy problems, especially for people embarking upon small side projects. Social auth can help with both with remarkably small effort on the dev's part.
Edit: Also if you'd really like to give it a shot, having a twitter account doesn't require you to use said twitter account.
Edit 2: Changed tone - "whether you like it or not" is way too confrontational of a phrase to use there - I apologize if I sounded like I was attacking.
1: There seems to be a social auth holy war going on. Your comment was respectful, so please don't think I mean you when I say this, but there's too damn many people saying the equivalent of "OHHH you shitbag! I hate the Facebook/Twitter/other! Why would you force me to have that in order to have your service?" The truth is that it wasn't meant as a personal slight - your opinions just fell on the wrong side of an early-stage tradeoff.
In the case of HireMyFriend we put in Twitter auth as a precursor to building a 'secretly DM your friends' feature that hasn't shipped yet.
That said - with an app based around your anonymity but the social presence of your friends & professional contacts I think this would work well for a developer without a social media presence. We'll consider adding email/password sign up in the coming weeks — I'm sure you appreciate how busy launches are :)