ReCrunch

[TC] Vidoop Turns OpenID into Pictures that Pay:

An OpenID startup called Vidoop aims to replace your usernames and passwords with a grid of pictures that may contain visual advertisements. … Signing into an OpenID-enabled site with myVidoop, or retrieving all of the passwords in your myVidoop keychain, involves not a username and password, but rather a visual grid of images that fall into particular categories. When you first create a myVidoop account, you pick 3-5 types of images (e.g. birds, skyscrapers, flowers, cars). Then whenever you need to authenticate with myVidoop, you simply type the letters of the images in a randomly generated grid that fall into your chosen categories.

You gotta be kidding me! Is this kindergarten? Does someone actually believe that remembering “3-5 types of images” is easier than one password? And that’s only the premise. Then you’re supposed to sit there and pick out the right images from a grid. Sure that’s simple, but so is reading CAPTCHAs and everyone loves those.

But wait! There’s more! The website operators win big too.

Vidoop will pay partner sites 1/100th of a cent every time someone uses myVidoop to sign into their sites. So, if you are a site owner who has 5,000 logins per day through myVidoop, you’ll get only $15 per month. But if you can persuade 1M of your users to log in with myVidoop every day, you’ll earn $3,000 per month.

For every user logging in, there are many more who checked off the “remember me” button, and even more who rarely visit the website. 1 million daily logins puts you among some of the most popular web destinations out there. For comparison, TechCrunch doesn’t get that many visitors in a month (if compete.com data is even remotely reliable). Any service with millions of users is already probably burning through millions of VC dollars. That $3,000 is going to make a difference?