Memo to OAuth Service Providers

Memo to OAuth Service Providers: think of your consumers as your partners, and not just "users".

• Understand that many of the consumer applications of your service are driving users to your site, and in the world of composable services, your consumer application developers will often have choice. Choice means power. Recognize.
• Keep the channels of communication open with developers of consumers of your service. Use blogs, email lists, IRC channels, and show up at community events that are relevant to your service (barcamps, superhappydevhouse, etc).
• Be transparent about API changes - try to schedule changes ahead of time, try to keep changes limited to a regular scheduled time, be prepared to rollback changes, and be especially available immediately after API changes.
• Think like a service provider and be concerned about security, availability and uptime, even if nobody is directly complaining - remember, your service availability may impact the perceived quality of the services offered by consumer applications.
• Be transparent about outages - you will have more credibility with your consumers (see above about choice).
• Be proactive about supporting consumer applications - know which consumer applications are accessing your service - you never know who your friends might be. I suspect OAuth will be a great channel for business development!

Service providers who do this well: Linden Labs (Second Life), Pair Networks.

If your interested in this topic, I'll be at SuperHappyDevHouse 20 this weekend, and at a OAuth implementers meetup at SHDH20.