DandyID Consolidates Your Online Presence

DandyID is part of a new genre of web applications, including the likes of Chi.mp and Cliqset, that aim to help you own your online identity. If you’ve read our previous post on Chi.mp, you pretty much have an idea of what DandyID may be able to do for you. There are some major differences between the two, though.

DandyID still allows you to collect all of your social profiles and identities in one place. It supports over 300 services. If you still can’t find the service you’re looking for, you can submit it. Once you’ve added all of your identities, you can compare yourself to others in the social media world by checking your Social Rank.

“The rank is a percentile system calculated from the number of sites you exist on (of the 320+ that DandyID supports) compared to all DandyID users. Your social rank is displayed on your public DandyID profile; you may also grab a Social Rank widget and show off on your own blog or website.”

My rank is 92, which is Gold. I’m not finished filling out my profiles, but I can’t imagine how many I’d need to get to Platinum. A few services also allow verification, so that people can tell that it’s really you. Services supported for verification currently include: Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Brightkite.

DandyID makes it easy to share your profile and identities with others. Your profile URL will be something like http://www.dandyid.org/id/rahsheen, which is nowhere near as cool as having a custom .mp URL like http://geekpi.mp, but it’s easy to remember. You can also generate an email signature, but this resulted in a 2-page long signature for me, so I don’t think I’ll be including that in any of my emails. The most sensible ways to share your identities are probably the Wordpress plugin, the Blogger widget, or the shiny new Facebook application, which they just dropped a couple days ago.

Probably the most interesting features of DandyID are those you get with a Pro account. It will cost you $4.99/month and you get:

• SEO Enhanced Links - Increase your visibility in top search engines, by passing the “link juice” through to your individual profiles
• Personal Stats - Track how people are connecting with your complete identity across the web
• Social Analytics – Learn where your contacts exist online and which social networks are most important to them
• Contact Updates - Get notified via RSS whenever one of your contacts adds a new service to DandyID
• Pro Mail - Send 5 messages per month to members who are not on your contacts list

The Personal Stats and Social Analytics are very interesting in that you would be able to get a detailed picture of exactly where your “friends” are, where your social media lives intersect, and which of your identities are getting the most action. If you try to be everywhere at once like I do, you’d have a better idea of where to hang out the most. Even if you just use a few sites, you would be able to spend your time more wisely.

Do you think it’s important to consolidate and own your social identity? Do you use DandyID, Chi.mp, or Cliqset?