Digital ID Coach

Tools: Vidoop and MyVidoop

November 26th, 2008

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Vidoop offers myVidoop to help people manage their passwords and fill in online forms. Filling in forms is a form of identity management. For instance, are you filling in a form to purchase something online? or to log into your work computer? The information needed for each transaction might be different (for example, addresses).

Vidoop also offers password and identity management solutions for businesses. Those tools will be covered in a future post.

Using MyVidoop

First, create an account with MyVidoop. Your user name becomes part of your OpenID, which you can use to easily create accounts and log into other services that recognize OpenIDs (such as this site, many blogs, perhaps soon: AOL, Yahoo, Google (who interestingly offer OpenIDs but don’t recognize other services!), and more.

Vidoop has an original way of dealing with passwords. They use an image grid, called an Image Shield, that contains pictures in certain categories, which you pick out when you set up your account. Once you give Vidoop your user name, it generates a grid like this.

$Vidoop\'s image interface$

You identify the pictures that correspond to your categories. In this grid, we might have picked the categories of cars, cats, and dogs. There are examples of those three along the bottom row. In the box below your image grid, you enter the letters corresponding to those categories: BDJ. Vidoop has a demo on their Image Shield.

Note: I set this up for an older friend of mine who was not very familiar with the Internet. He keeps wanting to click on the pictures, which often lead him to an advertisement or related website. For example, if he clicked on the car, it would take him to a car website. Not so good for him. He got pretty frustrated with this and wanted to change all of his logins and passwords to the same thing. (Not possible for a number of reasons.) He is learning that using myVidoop is easier than the alternative.

Once you’ve gotten access to your account, you can store information on various online accounts and various identities (for example: 1) your work address and phone, 2) your home financial information, and 3) your leisure or gaming identity). In fact you can store and access passwords for lots of sites, including sites that don’t yet recognize OpenID. This is a feature worth checking out, as it allows you to access all of your passwords from any computer (though Vidoop will check to make sure new browsers are ok, and will log the access).

Here are videos to give you more information about using Vidoop and getting started.

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