Blaine Cook

Blaine Cook is a Canadian software engineer born on December 19, 1980, currently serving as a Staff Engineer at Condé Nast. He resides in Nelson, British Columbia. Cook is notable for his foundational role in developing Twitter, where he was the lead developer and principal architect during its early days. He also co-authored the OAuth and WebFinger specifications, which are crucial for web authentication and identity management.

Career Highlights

• Twitter: Cook was one of the first engineers at Twitter, contributing significantly to its initial architecture before leaving in 2008.
• Yahoo!: After Twitter, he worked on the Fire Eagle project at Yahoo!.
• Poetica: Cook founded Poetica, a collaborative text-editing platform that was acquired by Condé Nast in March 2016. Following this acquisition, he continued with the company as a staff engineer, focusing on online publishing technologies and systems.12

Current Role

At Condé Nast, Cook leverages his extensive experience in social solutions to enhance the publisher's digital platforms. His work involves architectural development for various internal systems within the organization.345

Cook's insights into technology and regulation have also been featured in discussions about the future of social media and big tech companies, where he has expressed concerns about monopolistic practices and the lack of viable alternatives to platforms like Facebook.2