June 26, 2008
Vidoop’s News Clipping Service…
(more…)
June 24, 2008
myVidoop.com will be down for some updates from 9pm - 10pm CDT tonight June 24, 2008.
UPDATE:
Site maintenace complete. myVidoop back online as of 9:56pm CDT.
June 20, 2008
Over the past three years we’ve seen tremendous growth and increased adoption of OpenID. OpenID is quickly becoming the de-facto identity currency on the web but one of the biggest criticisms is its lack of usability. We’ve been thinking long and hard about this for the past few months at Vidoop and today we’re excited to launch Emailtoid. Emailtoid is a simple mapping service that enables the use of email addresses as OpenID identifiers. Feel free to give it a try on our example relying party.
Brad Fitzpatrick proposed a means to map email addresses to OpenID’s. Since then, people have been kicking around ways to do this. We decided to put together Emailtoid to see if Brad’s proposal has any legs as well as to really get the conversation going around how to take advantage of the fact that a lot of users on the web see their email address as an identifier.
From the Emailtoid website:
One of the criticisms of OpenID’s usability is the reliance on URLs for identifiers since people seem more comfortable identifying themselves by their email address. To remedy this problem, Emailtoid was established to offer a simple but robust means for turning email addresses into fully qualified OpenID URLs.
Once an account has been created on Emailtoid associating an email addresses with an existing OpenID (AOL, WordPress, etc), supporting relying parties can accept email addresses as identifiers without needing to ask for passwords.
Emailtoid is intended as a temporary solution to a usability problem in OpenID. If you run an email service and wish to resolve OpenIDs on behalf of your members, we have designed Emailtoid to always defer to email providers first, and then to fallback to our local resolution service if the email provider does not support email-to-OpenID resolution. We do this via XRDS discovery where we first ask the top level domain for a way to map email addresses to OpenIDs; if it doesn’t exist there, then the RP falls back to Emailtoid.
You will need to have support for OpenID on your site to make this work.
This isn’t the final solution but we’re hoping to start a dialog around the best practices for doing this. If you have questions/comments/concerns you can find us on our support site or via Twitter: @vidoop, @mtrichardson (the guy who actually did the work on Emailtoid - well done Michael), @kveton, @sblom or any of the Vidoop team you find on-line.
Update: Chris Messina did a great post about our new service. Its an excellent and detailed post about our thoughts on creating this service.
June 13, 2008
myVidoop is sending some developers over to our hosting company today. They will be diagnosing why some of you may have been experiencing server hiccups yesterday. So if you notice another hiccup today, do not worry, it’s the good kind that means something is getting improved.
For those of you who are curious, myVidoop.com is hosted using redundant servers with dual load balancers that help to direct the traffic to the website.
June 12, 2008
After an awesome company meeting in Tulsa, the first group of Vidoop peeps will arrive in Portland today! Lots of fun activities are planned, join us for Beer and Blog on Friday the 13th and hear @kveton and @mtrichardson explain DiSo. All the event info is here.
Then the entire Vidoop crew is going to get shanghai’d. Follow @kveton or @mtrichardson if you want to stay up to date on all the happenings / whereabouts.
If you are curious about the technology that drives Vidoop, makes our OpenID provider (myVidoop) so cool, etc. then check out this new video that gives a simple overview: http://www.confidenttechnologies.com/overview
June 9, 2008
Last week the entire Vidoop family gathered in Tulsa, OK to talk about the state of the company and plans for the future. We’ve had some exciting hires and things continue to happen for us on lots of fronts. I had a fantastic time getting to talk with the team in person while also getting to meet their families at the BBQ we threw after the all-hands.
We brought the families together as a chance to get to know each other but also to give them information about one of our biggest plans: we’re moving the company to Portland, OR. That’s right, we’re going to spend the next few months moving the entire company and their families (that’s over 40 people) from Tulsa to Portland.
Over the next three weeks, we’ll be flying groups of Vidoopers out to Portland to see the city. If you’re in Portland, you’ll get a chance to meet the team at the Beer & Blog events we’ll be sponsoring on 6/13, 6/20 and 6/27. We’d love to have you come out, have a drink with the crew and hopefully help pave the way for a soft landing for the folks moving out from Tulsa.
I’ll be blogging more over the next few weeks to explain why we’re making the move to Portland, give a heads up on who is coming out and ways you can get involved. Everyone at Vidoop is very excited about being part of such a fantastic tech community in Portland. Wagons westward!!
June 4, 2008
Here are a few features that we’ve added:
- Import your Pavatar from Flickr, Twitter, Digg, or websites that have Pavatar support; or upload your own avatar
- Faster logins when signing in to OpenID enabled sites and activating the myVidoop plugin
- Favicons caching of saved sites to allow for quicker loading of the Sites tab
- Stability and bug fixes
Let us know what you think!