Vidoop

» see vidoop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Vidoop's three years line up almost exactly with my first years working as an engineer, and i still never had an account. OpenID was in the air across that whole window and i knew perfectly well what it was for. Knowing what a login standard is meant to solve and actually routing your identity through a startup in Oklahoma are two different commitments, and almost nobody made the second one.

The company started in Tulsa. Wikipedia gives the year as 2006 and no month; the longer secondary accounts put it at march 2006 and name Joel Norvell and Luke Sontag as the founders, with Mitchell Savage running it as chief executive and talking about expansion in april 2007. Vidoop Secure launched publicly at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on 17 april 2007.

The part that was genuinely new was not the pictures. It was that the pictures were inventory. Vidoop sold the images inside the grid as advertising, so ConocoPhillips or a Tulsa pizza chain called Mazzio's could buy a slot in the one moment when a person is looking directly at a screen and cannot look anywhere else. Nobody had thought to monetize the login before, because everybody thought of the login as friction to be minimized rather than as a surface.

From january 2008 it went one step further and paid outward. Any site that let people sign in with a myVidoop OpenID earned a hundredth of a cent per login. TechCrunch worked the arithmetic at the time and put a site with a million sign-ins a day at about three thousand dollars a month. That is not a business for the site. It was still the first attempt anybody made to turn the act of signing in into revenue for the party that did not own the account.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how the login worked ~

At signup you picked three to five categories out of a list, things like airplanes or keys. From then on, every login drew you a grid of photographs with a random character printed on each one. You typed the characters sitting on the images that belonged to your categories, and that string was your password for that attempt and no other.

The claim was that this beat keystroke logging, because the captured keystrokes were worthless the next time, and beat phishing, because a fake page could not generate a valid grid. It also required the machine to be approved in advance, which added a second factor without anybody calling it that. The cost was that logging in took real seconds and real attention, at exactly the point in history when everything else was moving toward being logged in permanently and never thinking about it. That tension is the whole reason the category died.

~ the open source bill ~

In may 2008 Vidoop hired Chris Messina and Will Norris to work full time on DiSo, the distributed social networking project, which the company neither owned nor sold. Norris wrote on 15 may that a dinner conversation with Luke Sontag had sold him on it. Scott Kveton was in the same orbit. For about a year a small identity startup in Portland was directly paying two people to build the decentralized social web as free software, and that is a genuinely unusual line item on a payroll.

It is also, in hindsight, the shape of the problem. Vidoop had a real product with paying advertisers and it kept spending like a company whose revenue was somebody else's job. It grew to roughly forty five people by mid 2008. Wikipedia records the headcount as twenty six, which is probably the number left at the end rather than the number at the top, and both figures are in the record with nothing reconciling them.

~ the payroll ~

The 2008 move from Tulsa to Portland cost money, and a rewrite of the stack from PHP to Python cost more. The AOL deal announced in july 2008, which bound an ImageShield to an AOL OpenID and therefore reached something like a hundred million accounts on paper, was the sort of announcement that raises a round rather than the sort that pays for one.

Payroll was missed on 15 april 2009 and again in early may. On 5 may the investors on the deal that was going to fix it walked away. Layoffs went through the middle of the month. On 25 may Joel Norvell sent the staff an email saying Vidoop LLC was officially out of business and there were no funds to pay the unpaid wages or the other liabilities. TechCrunch published it on 30 may under a headline about the settlement, because what the company could offer instead of money was hardware: a laptop taken at its book value of a thousand dollars against a thousand dollars of back wages, with the employee owing tax on the book value.

~ what survived it ~

The idea Vidoop was right about is now everywhere and the idea it was selling is nowhere. Nobody types a URL as their identity, which is the thing OpenID actually asked people to do and the thing people would not do. Instead the buttons won, and the identity you carry across the web belongs to two or three companies that give it away free because owning it is worth more than charging for it. Vidoop's whole model assumed the login was a thing worth being paid for. It turned out to be a thing worth paying to control.

vidoop.com still resolves and refuses to serve anything. Over both plain http and https it returns a 406 generated by mod_security, a two-line page saying no appropriate representation of the requested resource could be found. Which is one way to describe what happened to the whole company.

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