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.

JanRain, owners of MyOpenID.com, and ConfidentTechnologies are both making announcements that could help make OpenID much friendlier. Confident is the half of Vidoop that serves enterprise and financial institutions.

IDSelector

JanRain's new service IDSelector is a login framework that plugs into sites that already have OpenID enabled on the back-end. Just a few lines of code put a friendly interface on top of existing OpenID login.

Here's a sample below:

Website owners can determine which providers are on the drop down list for their site and which order they will appear in. The company says that if IDSelector.com goes down for any reason, the javascript simply won't register and a site's own login field will remain.

Caveats

While this is a huge improvement over the most common practices for prompting OpenID login, there are still a few problems. First, though this is "provider neutral" - it's not a decentralized service and that's one of the best things about OpenID.

Second, it doesn't work perfectly for every provider because there is still a huge maze of different implementations on the market. Yahoo! for example, doesn't want a username here in a URL - you're just supposed to click Yahoo! and then login. That takes you over to Yahoo! to provide your username there.

Some authenticating parties support OpenID 2.0 and some don't. Presumably that will change someday soon.

Finally, this is still URL centric. It's easier than just prompting people for a URL. Though some people contend that this is an easy way to tech people about signing in with a URL, others will no doubt argue that the term OpenID and URLs shouldn't be shown to users at all if this is going to go mainstream.

Confident Technology's RecoginitionAUTH™ to Power Many More Services

If you've seen consumer web OpenID provider MyVidoop's implementation of OpenID login then you've got a pretty good idea of how Confident's RecognitionAUTH works. The technology asks users to identify images that are of a type they associated their account with, instead of using a password.

Today Confident is announcing that a host of other OpenID providers are going to start using the RecognitionAUTH system to allow their users to login as well. ClaimID, Clickpass and ooTao (iNames) will all use enable their users to login using the Image Shield technology behind RecognitionAUTH.

The idea here is that users will never have to read the word OpenID, look at any URLs or otherwise get confused. The service is already in use by a number of financial institutions.

We hear that AOL is also in advanced testing with Image Shield, so the solution could spread much further even faster than it already is in the financial services sector.

Vidoop/Confident is quickly gaining momentum, branching out from their home base in Tulsa, Oklahoma to open a Portland, Oregon office. The entirely revenue-funded company hired OpenID Foundation Chair Scott Kveton and is now quietly hiring up many of the smartest geeks in town, challenging JiveSoftware for talent. Already the home of the inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham), the initiator of the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds), a boatload of RSS and OpenSource-heads, Portland Oregon is also becoming a hotbed of OpenID work. In addition to Confident's office, JanRain is based in Portland as well.

Will Either of These Catch On?

There are a lot of big questions all around OpenID. It's a new paradigm with solid potential and exciting possibilities. In order to actualize all that potential, though - the front door to using OpenID needs to be more accessible. There's a wide range of providers, features and approaches. To learn more check out SpreadOpenID.org.

Both of these seem like great first steps. Which do you prefer? What would you like to see happen to make OpenID more usable for non-technical folks - or for yourself?

The addition of Kveton to its staff should push Vidoop into the public consciousness in a big way, concerning OpenID and open platforms.

For readers interested in learning more about OpenID and related data portability matters, Kveton did an excellent interview on Phil Windley's Technometria last month that will satisfy both the uninitiated and the already involved.

The Vidoop Product

Vidoop asks users to select a handful of topical categories which are then used to populate images in a square of largely random tiled images. See the example below. If when creating your account with Vidoop you said you like pictures of dogs, birds and board games - then you and only you would know to pick out the letters embedded in the handful of images in a grid presented at login that happen to contain dogs, birds and board games. Some of those images will include advertisements! In other words, Vidoop has found a way to monetize OpenID authentication - and they are doing it live with a handful of major corporate customers already. See the sample below. It's much easier used than explained, by me at least.

It's strangely fascinating and I'm not sure how happy I am about the advertisements sneaking their way into my consciousness as I look closely for puppy pictures. That said, we here at RWW have puppy pictures hidden inside our ads on site too (look!) so who am I to criticize?

Readers interested in comparing various OpenID providers should see the vendor comparison chart at SpreadOpenID.org.