I'm so excited that IMVU now supports OpenID that I wanted to post about it. Dusty has put up a simple forums post announcing it here.

What does this mean?
If you are an IMVU customer, you have an OpenID. The format is avatars.imvu.com/YourAvatarName. You can use this to log into any site that supports OpenID, some of which are listed here: http://openiddirectory.com/. I recommend LiveJournal as a great place to start - you can log in and post a comment to someone's journal using only your IMVU OpenID.

Why is this cool?
We hope IMVU developers of all kinds will use OpenID to make their IMVU-affiliated sites work without requiring you to register a separate account, and without you having to give them your IMVU password. We hope IMVU credits resellers will use this to make purchasing credits that much more secure, reliable, and convenient.

Completely honored and flattered to be included: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/special_reports/20070326techsbesty.htm

Most of you probably don't realize that you can search IMVU's catalog right from a9. You can also embed catalog searches pretty much anywhere you can display an RSS feed.

It looks like this:

To add the IMVU search panel to a9, simply go to a9.com, and pull down the More choices... selector. Search for IMVU in the column search, and add it.

If you want to use these as RSS (or OpenSearch) feeds, here's the URL syntax.

Believe it or not, IMVU is going to turn two years old next month. That's right, we started April Fool's Day, 2004. Appropriate, no?

So, to celebrate, I thought it was time to start a blog dedicated to the incredibly community that has sprung up around the germ of an idea we started working on two April Fools past.

Since I'm IMVU's CTO, my plan is to keep things rather technical, following Chris' lead. For starters, I'm working on some notes for a short case study of IMVU's development process, to date. We've done our best to incorporate ideas from Extreme Programming, support the free software community, and iterate as fast as possible based on your feedback. We don't always succeed, but I'm proud of what we've accomplished so far.

What do the next two years hold for IMVU? Maybe I'll blog about it next.