By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

With the proliferation of so many social media services, identity management has become a full time job. What sites do I participate in? What sites do I stake my claim so someone doesn’t swipe my name?

DandyID just announced their new automated identity mining service, ClaimMyName, allowing you to select your vanity ID and up to 3 alternates to search across all of DandyID’s listed services. Choose to purchase a Starter Pack allowing you to choose 20 services or opt for the Pro Pack with 300 services. The automated engine will run behind the scenes and send you a digest e-mail within 3 business days.

Watch as Sara demonstrates how it works:


The Starter Pack starts at a robust $79.99, and may well be worth it for those seriously interested in protecting their brand across most of the major social media services. For those who live and die by use of their name, the Pro Pack has been made available at $699.99, or just over $2.00 per service.

Clearly the equation here is whether the time it would take the serious social media maven to manually and individually sign up for each service would be worth this entry fee. As the world of social media matures, more and more services will have to turn to various for-pay models. However, with so many social media services having trained their legions of users that free is the admission price, even the starter pack will seem a steep price, in my opinion.

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Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. He is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.

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By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

In January 2009, I stumbled across a wonderful little company with a big idea: Create one place to collect, control, discover, and analyze your social profiles – a LinkedIn of social media, if you will.

Where services such as Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed help you create or manage content, DandyID’s ultimate objective is not to be another repository for content, but an identity and brand management dashboard of your online profiles which comprise the you-component in social media.

Since January, Sara Czyzewicz, Arron Kallenberg, and the growing DandyID team continue to fine tune their engine and are announcing a few new services for their growing subscriber base. I had a chance to catch-up with Arron on the phone last week, and we spent a few hours discussing some of the exciting new offerings coming to DandyID:

Verification Services:

Think of verification as the VeriSign of social media. The new verification services will allow you, as a DandyID community member, to create an authentic, centralized hub displaying all of your various social profiles in a convenient and discoverable identity management offering.

A few of the first verification integrations are:

1. Twitter
   
2. Brightkite
3. MySpace
4. YouTube
5. Flickr
6. Facebook
   

Free and Pro Versions:

DandyID is launching a “Pro” version to complement their free offering. When asked about the difference, Arron succinctly offered this explanation:

The Free version is very rich, and intended to help you collect yourself, verify yourself, and proliferate yourself. The Pro version is intended to help you understand the impact of your identity and brand, ultimately bringing value to the identity.

Analytics:

As part of their new Pro version of DandyID, analytics are being introduced for those more interested in understanding the impact of their social identity, what services their community frequents, and where the ideal intersection of community and identity proliferation might exist

1. Personal Stats: Comprised of Service Stats, Site Stats and Users these services offer a handy toolset to dig in and understand how people are using your profiles to find you, a traffic breakdown of how people are using your services, and other DandyID users who have visited your identity.

2. Social Analytics: This tool allows you to visually see what percentage of your friends frequent various services such as FriendFeed, Twitter, or Facebook.. A great use for this might be to help you increase your interaction within a given service subset to maximize the time you pour into your social brand.

3. Contact Updates: Build an RSS feed to monitor identity updates by your communities.

Intersections:

In summary, the DandyID team continues to build out some interesting offerings in pursuit of the perfect web. However, I think I am most enamored with the thought of what this young service can offer to us to this fractured social web in which we all live in today.

Does this create a hub from which the spokes of our brand can turn?

Only time will tell, but at the intersection of our exponentially increasing activity and the evolution from search to discovery lies the need to proliferate your online identity in a meaningful and manageable way.

What path do you intend to take?

Update: Allen Stern posted some really great information here, and a SXSW video interview.

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Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. He is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.

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By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

"One place to manage you and your relationships online," the slogan goes. Although it sounds a bit like a dating site, DandyID (launched in May of 2008 by co-founders Sara Czyzewicz and Arron Kallenberg) offers an intriguing way to connect your online identities. While many aggregators offer the promise of an integrated panacea, DandyID proposes taking it one step further.

Are you connected with someone on Facebook and don't know their Twitter handle? Are you following someone's blog on Blogger, and you want to know their FriendFeed URL? Well, DandyID not only offers you the promise of unifying the varied fragments of your online persona, but allows you to explore the possibility of uncovering just where you and your friends' online lives touch.

Think LinkedIn's degrees of connection, but expand that to over 100 social media sites - and now you might just have a powerful relationship building platform.

The Good Stuff:

1. Wordpress Widget: DandyID offers a widget for my blog, where I can publish a readily available menu of places my readers can connect with me using other services. There was no complex configuration. I added the widget, entered my e-mail address, and it synched all of my selected services right across.


2. Auto-Population: When I was first configuring my profile in DandyID, I started with my FriendFeed account. I was amazed that it then went on to poll all of the feeds I had configured within FriendFeed - dramatically speeding that often tedious process of configuring yet another social media site to connect with all of your others.


3. Suggested Relationships: Perhaps one of the most interesting features was the option of suggested relationships. True to their word, the makers of DandyID offered me a few DandyID subscribers (Chris Brogan and Tina aka Stupid Blogger) to connect with.

Will DandyID Become a Launch-Pad?

Launch-Pad is DandyID's answer to a closed web. It attempts to become the single portal through which you can visit over 70 of your favorite sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and the list goes on. DandyID's blog had this to say about Launch-Pad, now in private alpha):

Make no mistake, DandyID does not view Launch-Pad as an ideal solution to the plethora of walled gardens that exists online today; but rather as a band-aid for users who are suffering as a result of a closed web — it is our knee-jerk response to an imperfect internet. DandyID’s long-term focus is on building services that empower the user and add-value on top of [Joseph Smarr's] New Open Stack.

I have requested an invitation to the Launch-Pad alpha, and hope to have a review of it for all of the LouisGray.com viewers in the coming weeks.

Is DandyID There Yet?

I have been impressed with how smooth the integrations have been with the various services. While the overall power of a service such as this will only come through massive adoption, I have been readily impressed by the ease of configuration and suggestive logic deployed.

In reading DandyID's sparse blog, I get a feeling that Sarah and Arron are attempting to deliver a special answer to the barrage of sites to which we find ourselves subscribing - attempting to find a way to help us discover a deeper level of meaning in our community.While the service is still less than a year old, I highly suggest you take a look at what's under the hood. I look forward to seeing you around the block, and who knows - maybe DandyID can help us stitch together the scraps of fabric we now call social media.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, you may visit him at DandyID.

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