As mentioned in #330, the curl examples in the Authentication docs might be misleading for some users.

For example, users shouldn't try to authenticate as mojombo because it will fail, and some users might think that the way to fix this is to modify the URL somehow (e.g. replace user with their username):

$ curl -u mojombo https://api.github.com/user

Instead, I'd like to suggest a templetized approach to the curl command, like so:

$ curl -u <username> https://api.github.com/user

Using :username as the format for templetizing might be confusing when not used in the URL. The second curl example in this page demonstrates this problem. So, this could be confusing:

$ curl -u :token:x-oauth-basic https://api.github.com/user

but this probably won't be:

$ curl -u <token>:x-oauth-basic https://api.github.com/user

cc @gjtorikian @jasonrudolph