Blaine Cook is a Canadian software engineer, now living and working in London, UK. He is the principal co-author of the OAuth

OAuth

OAuth is an open standard for authorization. It allows users to share their private resources stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically username and password.OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of credentials to their data hosted by a...

 and Webfinger

Webfinger

WebFinger is an Internet protocol that aims to identify people by their E-mail addresses. It is an extension of the Finger protocol used by the unix finger utility to identify users of a particular computer in a network...

 specifications. He is the former lead developer of social networking site Twitter

Twitter

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

. He has also worked for Yahoo on the Fire Eagle

Fire Eagle

Fire Eagle is a Yahoo! owned service that acts as a store for a user's location. It was created at Yahoo Brickhouse by a team which included among others Tom Coates, Simon Willison, and Seth Fitzsimmons....

 project and for BT Group

BT Group

BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...

 as part of their Open Source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 Osmosoft team. He is now a freelance developer.

External links

• Cook's Home page
• "Why Twitter Matters" by Stephen Baker, Business Week (May 15, 2008)
• "Twitter techie Blaine Cook talks about leaving" by Caroline McCarthy, CNET News (April 23, 2008)
• "Twitter to jump off Ruby on Rails?" by Anthony Ha, The Industry Standard (May 1, 2008)
• "Busy Twitter a poster child for new communications" by Stephen Lawson, Computerworld (March 14, 2008))
• "Twitter’s to-do list: Become obsessive about uptime" by Larry Dignan, ZDNet
  ZDNet
  ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic and SmartPlanet. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991 as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET...
  
   (April 23, 2008)
• "Ireland not open for business, says Twitter innovator" by Kathryn Johnston The Times
  The Times
  The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
  
  (February 8 2009)