Wednesday, January 12, 2011

What are the best online services available for managing your various online IDs and Personas?

I'm kicking the tires on some of the net's identification management websites. Let me clarify this ambiguous term...(and please let me know if there's a better name for sites like these)

A site which compiles a list of your other online personalities and profiles and provides some helpful functionality to make working with all of those profiles a little easier.

Clearly, this encompasses a large list of sites but to be perfectly honest, I don't feel anyone has really nailed this down in any really nice way. I'm mostly interested in services which make it EASY to use all of these different channels of communication we have available to us.

Sites I'm looking for are similar to these (with special attention to my notes):

  • http://flavors.me (Nice interface, pulls resource data into one screen.)
  • http://card.ly (Painfully basic and ends up being yet another online profile to manage)
  • http://google.com/profiles (Steps beyond an online profile and provides a nice way to interact with the person, but keeps you in Google's walled garden.)

Features I'm interested in seeing (but doesn't need to hit ALL of these points):

  • Makes communicating across services easy
  • Organizes your various online profiles
  • Makes specific personas and profiles conditionally available
  • Provides proxy services to better manage privacy
  • Supports open architectures/services (OAuth, OpenID, etc)
  • Friendly and fun to use?

I'm really hoping some people will dig up services which I'm not familiar with and could suggest some other features which might be useful in such a service which I might have overlooked.

  • DandyID is a service that might at least satisfy some of your needs. The most important thing it does: You can create a DandyID-account (basic or pro version) you can link to your various accounts on social services from Twitter to facebook or AIM, so you can create a verified DandyID profile that can sync to all your other online identities, which makes it a lot easier to keep those services up to date.

    DandyID provides you with a globally recognizable profile that you only need to fill out once. The profile then follows you around the web and automatically appears on DandyID-enabled sites. When something changes, you can update it just one time from a single location, and the updates will be reflected on all of your DandyID-powered profiles.

    It can also display widgets for wordpress, blogger etc to link to your verified all-in-one-profile

    EDIT: It seems yiid is doing a similar thing, plus it appears to be acting as an openID provider, too.

    From Jemus42
  • Check out Gist, it appears to fit most of your needs.

  • I've been setting a profile up on a site simply called "E" What I like about it is that you can have public and private profiles that you share with other folks, as well as create a digital "card" to display on your site.

    They also have mobile apps so that you can easily share your contact details with others. In the case of the iPhone version, if both people are using E, a simple up swipe on the screen and your card is sent to the other user.

    Michael : This is probably the most unique and compelling of all of the services suggested so far. I was unaware of their existence! Thanks so much!
    Michael : Did a more thorough review of this site and found it to be lacking in many aspects. The most important being: **-** Lack of verification of connected services. **-** Lack of activity on their blog or GetSatisfaction forum. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
    From Dillie-O

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