The community has shown its strength and value. Twitter’s management was a very active and valuable participant in that community. Their actions have increased my trust in their decision making and I will be more tolerant of future decisions they may make when I don’t agree with them.

A security issue was discovered. The issues was brought to the attention of the OAuth folks. They quickly discussed the issue with key customers (Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Plaxo, others). They worked as community to come up with a short term solution. They short term solution was distributed to broader customer group. The solution was implemented. A major risk was adverted.

The official post is here http://blog.oauth.net/2009/04/22/acknowledgement-of-the-oauth-security-issue/.

I am more confident in the OAuth community and its ability to provide a very important solution to the API ecosystem. I also have to give a major amount of credit to the Twitter team for their actions, they took a lot of heat at a time when they are being scrutinized by everyone.

Negative press here http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/22/twitter-oauth-temporarily-disabled-leaves-developers-hanging/

Twitter’s post issue post on the problem and why they handled it the way they did http://blog.twitter.com/2009/04/whats-deal-with-oauth.html

The OAuth more the OpenID is critical to the growth and opportunities API’s provide online. The success of OAuth and its adoption are critical to data portability. Hopefully the events will increase the development communities confidence and accelerate its adoption.