You might have noticed that, except for a few occasional tweets and direct communication with some of you, we've been in radio silent mode since July 2009. We regret that it took so long but we had to make this decision for legal and financial reasons which I'm not able to disclose here. Our goal was to have everything sorted out by September 2009 but, unfortunately, things took much longer than expected, putting everything on hold until now.

Nevertheless, we managed to make everything to keep tarpipe running during that period while figuring out how to solve our problems and continue what we proposed at the beginning of this journey. In the meantime we learned some lessons that I believe are worth sharing here:

• Creating a company: unless you have obvious reasons, never create a company on a different country. Everything becomes endlessly more difficult: you either need to go there whenever you have to deal with legal stuff or pay someone to do it for you;
• Raising capital: if you don't have anyone on the team dedicated to this task, get someone quickly or get out of the game while you can. Raising capital is a full time job that requires a lot of attention, negotiation, communication skills and also some luck. As a bonus, if you're not near the VC, you'll need to travel a lot;
• Focusing on the original plan: sometimes things change during the development of a product. Markets change a lot for a simple reason: companies are constantly testing products on real people. Don't try to follow every move your competitors make as it will quickly drain your resources and make you loose your focus. Trust your guts and follow your original idea;
• Marketing at conferences: while conferences are a great way to market your products, you should be aware that everybody else is also there trying to get as many eye balls as possible. Going to conferences without any marketing preparation won't get you any substantial leads;
• Surviving without any income: you only feel the true taste of entrepreneurship when things go awry and you find yourself juggling your bills at the end of every month. The worst possible time to fall into this situation is during the summer. Always try to have a cash backup and calculate in advance so that you don't get trapped while everybody else is having fun at the beach.

I'm happy to say that, despite having spent very difficult times, we're again at the wheel. A positive aspect of this hiatus is that a lot has happened on the social media landscape and some new technologies make our initial vision more tangible now. Our full attention goes to further develop tarpipe while embracing those technologies.

We thank everyone of you for your continued support without which we certainly couldn't get this far. The show must go on!

There's a growing discussion around the Web about the future of OpenID and whether it's really making lives easier for users. The article "OpenID Is Here. Too Bad Users Can't Figure Out How It Works" on Webmonkey shows some of the concerns users seem to have about this open authentication mechanism:

However, the usability problem has engineers and design experts scratching their heads. While the typical internet user probably already has an OpenID account tied to their Google account, AOL name or Yahoo ID, they still don’t know how to use it.

Poor usability seems to be one of the main obstacles to the wide adoption of OpenID on the consumer side, leaving users clueless about how it really works. Quoting the article "What is this OpenID Everyone Speaks Of?" on Pixel Bits:

Well. I don’t know about you, but to me? OpenID is nothing but a bunch of gibberish.

Well, is it? This article generated a good discussion on FriendFeed, because it directly questions OpenID usefulness and why users should abandon the username and password model that has been around for so long. Let's try to answer some of the questions.

Is OpenID hard to use?

The argument against OpenID is that URLs are too hard to remember, and using one to identify yourself is worse than using plain old usernames and passwords.

I believe this can be easily solved by exposing a friendlier user interface. Instead of simply asking for an OpenID, applications should start using solutions similar to JanRain's ID Selector where several OpenID providers can be chosen from a single interface.

What are the benefits of OpenID?

The major benefit of OpenID is the ability to sign in to multiple applications using the same identifier. Instead of remembering multiple usernames and passwords you just need to enter your OpenID and you're in.

Another benefit is that it's an open protocol upon which anyone can contribute. There are multiple Open Source libraries in many different programming languages, making it easy to implement your own consumer application solution.

Are there any good alternatives to OpenID?

Sure, there are alternatives, but they're all proprietary and they're not decentralizing the Single Sign-On solution. Also, they could be interoperable with OpenID, expanding their reach to a broader audience of consumer applications.

So, what next?

Much needs to be done about OpenID usability and how users react to it. OpenID should transmit the idea of a secure, easy to use and always available authentication solution.

Chris Messina is proposing some innovation on this area after he is elected as community representative to the OpenID Foundation board. If you care about OpenID and its future, I think you should cast your vote now.

Here are two screencasts showing how you can use tarpipe's workflow design interface to connect multiple services together and share information across the Web.

The first one is about using tarpipe to automatically tag screenshots using Evernote's recognition feature. Quoting the article "Evernote Integration Spotlight: Tarpipe":

The Tarpipe/Evernote integration allows you to add content into your Evernote account, as well as automatically extract content, such as recognition data and URLs to public notes, which can then be shared with other supported services.

Watch the original screencast on YouTube

The second one was created by Benjamin Mestrallet and it's about integrating eXo Platform WebOS with tarpipe, letting you share pictures automatically on services like flickr and twitter. Quoting the article "Mashups: Publish from eXo ECM to the consumer web with TarPipe":

More and more eXo customers want to leverage consumer sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, SlidesShare, FriendFeed to promote new products or corporate messages.

Watch the original screencast on YouTube

I hope you enjoyed watching! Do you have any ideas for other screencasts?

Summer is here and you might want to go to the beach or to the park. Why not take pictures of your outdoors experience and share them with the people that are following your activities?

Here's a quick guide to setup a workflow that will publish a picture on flickr and announce it on twitter.

Open the accounts tab:

Insert your twitter credentials:

Give tarpipe permission to upload pictures to your flickr account:

Open the workflows tab:

Create a new workflow:

Give it a title and optionally a description:

Click on the MailDecoder connector:

Click on the Flickr connector:

Click on the TwitterUpdater connector:

Arrange the connectors around the canvas:

Connect the MailDecoder's subject to the Flickr's title:

Connect the MailDecoder's imageAttachment to the Flickr's picture:

Connect the MailDecoder's subject to the TwitterUpdater's title:

Connect the Flickr's pictureUrl to the TwitterUpdater's url:

Save the workflow:

Notice the email address that appeared above the "save workflow" button:

Now, simply take a picture with your cell phone and send it to this email address. Your subject line will be used as the picture's title and also as the text posted to twitter:

That's it. It might be a good idea to save the workflow email address as a contact on your cell phone. Now you can show everybody what you're up to!

Oh, and don't forget the sun blocker. Have fun!

tarpipe is a publishing mediation and distribution platform that will simplify regular upload activities:

• Publishing content to multiple Web locations
• Combining different media into a single blog post or article
• Transforming documents on-the-fly
• Managing repeatable upload actions

By providing different ways to upload files without installing a desktop or mobile application we will make publishing a very simple task. Users will be able to use existing applications, creating and manipulating their documents like they’re used to.

tarpipe will also create an ecosystem where Web applications and services will be able to receive and transform media content. Users will take advantage of this ecosystem by defining delivery and transformation workflows for their documents.