The simplest example I can think of is to create an app on twitter https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new They hand you a consumer k

The simplest example I can think of is to create an app on twitter https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new They hand you a consumer key and a consumer secret which are used to access the API. Then, individual users must use an Access token and Secret, to get back an Auth Token. While you don't need to be that sophisticated, requiring some authentication for queries against your webservice will allow you to disable shared or abusive keys.