It is official, long time OSS advocates and developers Chris Messina and Will Norris will be joining a Vidoop team that has been tasked with building a truly open distributed social networking infrastructure. They will continue to lead efforts with the DiSo Project (http://diso-project.org). DiSo - distributed social networking applications, is an umbrella development for a group of open source components such as OpenID and XMPP that will lead to the development of user-controlled distributed social networking concepts, portable social networks and user data portability.

“The open protocols that make up DiSo, such as OpenID, are quickly gaining traction across the internet,” said Scott Kveton, Vidoop’s VP of Open Platforms. “Vidoop will be using these protocols to integrate DiSo functionality into its OpenID provider, myVidoop.com, and will continue to secure these IDs through its unique image based technology.“

You may know Chris Messina from such community efforts as “Spread Firefox”, “BarCamp”, he also helped to push open web standard initiatives such as “OpenID”, “OAuth” and “Microformats”. Will Norris has been active in the realm of identity management working actively with “Shibboleth”, “OpenID”, and “MicroID”. Norris is also the author of WP-OpenID, the technology that provides OpenID support for Wordpress.

Everyone at Vidoop is very excited to have these two on board and look forward to the vision that they will bring to the team. “Messina and Norris are considered thought leaders in their field,” says Joel Norvell, President and CEO of Vidoop. “They will help deliver and promote the next generation of social networking tools based on open protocols. These tools add great functionality for the user and reinforce Vidoop’s role in the secure OpenID space.”