Chris Whipple writes about how various blogging and social networking sites have managed the creation of developer communities. He discusses the importance of the ‘RERO (release early, release often) mentality’ and compares the developer communities of Six Apart, Technorati and Flickr, drawing some pertinent conclusions:

These three companies have had vibrant communities spring up around them thanks to a combination of developer relations and the high quality of their product or service. Each company has taken a slightly different approach to providing an environment in which to court the developers needed to grow their offering. There’s still room for improvement in each of these communities and I think they can learn from one another. Six Apart and Flickr should allow developers to annotate their API documents. Technorati should keep the spammers out by walling off its developer’s wiki. Flickr should open up its mailing list archives; this is valuable information that needs to be indexed by search engines.