The Story Of X:

• In the beginning was xauth, a command-line utility that let you set which machines and users had authority to connect to your X windows display.
• Then there was XAUTH, part of the authentication mechanism in IPSec secure connections.
• xAuth, on the other hand, is variation on the OAuth protocol. It's being proposed by Twitter as a more convenient way for apps to authenticate with online services.
• And now we have XAuth, a platform developed by Meebo to allow one website to see which other online services you might be logged into.

Come on guys! It's time to start using some other letters! Otherwise, we'll have to think of a way of pronouncing the different capitalisations, so that when geeks say to each other over coffee, "Why don't we just use x-auth?", they don't then all go and implement incompatible things...