OAuth a central part of Google’s “open web” strategy

Photo by Anand Iyer.

It’s exciting and rewarding to be on the side of the open web lately. APIs are open, content is being licensed in proactive, less restrictive terms, contact lists are being freed up, and people will be increasingly able to connect with friends, whether they have an account with every website on the web or not.

When we started the OAuth project, we aimed to solve problems that two small, independent web companies had (namely, Ma.gnolia and Twitter). We didn’t have any grandiose ideas that Google or Yahoo or AOL or MySpace would ever pick up on our work, only that we needed to solve the problem in a way that was vendor neutral, but also didn’t unnecessarily reinvent the wheel.

Turned out that our work was useful not just for its technical merits, but that it also enabled large companies like Yahoo and Google to have a common protocol — shepherded by independent individuals without much of an agenda save producing good tech — to hash out the slight differences in their own protocols and move to a shared standard.

Where there used to be BBAuth, FlickrAuth, AuthSub and similar protocols, there will eventually be primarily, or only, OAuth. And the time in which its taken to get here has been microscopic compared with similar adoption cycles in the past. That, less than six months since the final spec was released, Google is already championing the protocol as a lynchpin to its overall “open web” strategy alongside other standards efforts like OpenID and OpenSocial really demonstrates the power of devoted, focused community groups that form around solving fairly straight-forward and well-articulated problems, using open and distributed collaborative means to come to some kind of shared agreement, understanding and implementation approach.

There are inevitably still any number of issues to be addressed in our work, but that we’ve come so far so quickly, and with such recognition, is something I think is worth pausing for a moment and considering before we dive back in and keep pushing forward.