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.
