DiSo Project Figures Messina and Norris Join Vidoop
Chris Messina and Will Norris, two leading community figures working on distributed social networking, identity and data portability, are joining the staff of OpenID provider Vidoop, the company will announce soon. Messina and Norris have been working on a project called DiSo, an umbrella group working to bring open source distributed social networking technologies to market. They will continue the same work, now as a part of Vidoop. The company provides user login functionality to both consumer and enterprise web publishers, using an innovative system based on image recognition to replace passwords.
Vidoop's product always elicits some skeptical reactions at first, but the company's momentum is undeniable. If you love seeing innovation emerge, watch out for what Vidoop does next with the addition of Messina and Norris.
Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Vidoop is a fast growing, revenue generating company that's hiring aggressively and opening new offices first in Portland, Oregon and now in San Francisco. Earlier this year the company hired OpenID Foundation Chairman Scott Kveton, himself a man with enough energy to carry a growing company around the world on his back. Renaissance players Messina and Norris join a team of smart young developers that are likely to produce some very fun work.
The Hires
Chris Messina is best known for his work as a volunteer with the Spread Firefox campaign, an effort that was key in gaining market share for the now widely loved browser. He has been a primary figure in the explosion of the tech unconference phenomenon BarCamp, an event that has spread to the furthest corners of the globe faster than anyone probably could have imagined. He has also been a key player in the co-working movement, an effort to spread public workspaces for independent workers around the world. Much of Messina's work over the last few years has been done with Tara Hunt, a co-founder of the consultancy Citizen Agency.
Behind the scenes Messina is a key force behind the work on standards initiatives like oAuth, microformats and OpenID - all essential components of the most popular vision of a mashup-driven, machine readable and data-portable future for the web.
Will Norris is a developer of the same flavor, focuses on Identity matters and has written several key Wordpress plug-ins for identity and microformats.
Norris wrote cryptically about a new job last week: "The primary attraction to the new job is quite simply the work I'll be doing and who I'll be doing it with -- I'll finally be able really dig in to some of the projects that haven't received the level of attention I would have liked to give."
The Future of Vidoop
User authentication might seem like a boring topic, but in reality it's not at all. While OpenID gets sold as "single sign-on" and a matter of convenience, there's a world of possibilities enabled when identities are confirmed through a trusted 3rd party.
One avenue being explored by several companies is using OpenID combined with FOAF (Friend of a Friend) data for spam control. That's just one example of what could be possible.
Vidoop has had a strong team of engineers from the start. As someone who's excited about standards based identity and the innovation that open technology makes possible - I am very interested to see what Vidoop and its new additions will be able to do. Check out what the two have sought to do for some time over at the DiSo Project. Now that they are doing that work with backing and as a part of a substantial team, expect nothing less than magic.
Comments
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Man, Vidoop is snatching up some big names in the OpenID and distributed social network world. Big congrats to Messina and Norris!
Posted by: Justin Kistner | May 13, 2008 4:17 PM
Big news for Portland as Vidoop's presence here (Scott Kveton and crew) continues to have effects on the local scene. Will Chris and Will be spending much time here in Portland? Congrats to all. Go, Vidoop!
Posted by: Alex Williams | May 13, 2008 4:22 PM
I got all excited when I heard that they were joining, but I was hoping that they were moving here to Portland.
Oh well, it's still great news!
Posted by: Josh Pyles | May 13, 2008 4:34 PM
Thanks for the post Marshall, we are definitely excited to have these guys on board!
Posted by: Kevin Fox | May 13, 2008 4:37 PM
I'll be honest. I have no idea how people with such a belief in OpenID and open source could work for a for-profit organization. Those two just seem noncongruent, and therefore in my mind it seems a tad hypocritical of the players to do so. My two cents. Can you cover this, do I need a mindset change, am I missing something? Cheers.
Posted by: Sharon Greenfield | May 13, 2008 4:41 PM
Sharon:
Without the weight of companies getting behind Open Source, there's no way many of our projects could survive. In fact, its often GREAT for a project to be started, or have its main contributors employed by normal companies. It means "you can stop worrying about eating and start coding again".
Some examples of OS/Corporate love:
Google and Python
Mozilla and Firefox (and jQuery)
SixApart and memcached (and OpenID)
37signals and Ruby on Rails
Posted by: Sam Alexander | May 13, 2008 5:07 PM
This is indeed great news - congratulations guys!
@Sharon, IBM has been a constant and strong supporter of numerous open source projects, and they're about as button down as it gets. There's no contradiction of goals, only the growing knowledge that open code projects are often better for business and for the consumer.
Posted by: Todd Sieling | May 13, 2008 5:51 PM
Congrats to Chris and Will!
Posted by: Andrew Hyde | May 13, 2008 7:03 PM
Congratulations Guys!
(For the detractors, unfortunately eating and paying the bills is a necessary evil.)
Posted by: Mark Cross | May 14, 2008 3:40 AM
Congrats!
Btw how's DiSo different from BuddyPress? Sounds similar?..
Posted by: MyMesh.com | May 14, 2008 3:57 AM
@Sharon Greenfield - Open Source has nothing to do with gratis distribution - but with libre. For-profit is therefore not opposed to OSS at all.
@MyMesh - the difference is that BuddyPress is a social network build on Wordpress and DiSo is trying to build the tools for distributed social networks on any platform.
Posted by: Stephen Paul Weber | May 14, 2008 5:47 AM
Lots of brilliant minds here! Looking forward to watching all the progress.
Posted by: Anna Atwell | May 14, 2008 5:04 PM