3 Ways to Aggregate Your Identity

By Mike Gunderloy Jun. 29, 2007, 12:00pm PT 24 Comments

LinkedIn, FaceBook, Blogger, Twitter, Jaiku…these days it’s not unusual for web workers to maintain membership in multiple online communities. The problem with this is that at some point you hit a level of diminishing returns: you can spend so much time managing and maintaining your online identity that you can’t actually get any work done or remember which contacts you met where. As always, one person’s problem is another’s opportunity, and now we’re seeing a number of attempts at identity aggregation: sites and services that promise one-stop management of all of your social networking. Here are three of the players in this new space.

ProfileLinker supports over 75 different networks, ranging from the big names like LinkedIn and Flickr to more obscure online locales such as Catster and Amie Street. After creating your ProfileLinker account, you then enter the details of your other accounts, creating a sort of master directory entry. ProfileLinker offers search services, so you can find other people (or they can find you) across all the various networks they support. The biggest advantage of ProfileLinker is that it probably includes the networks you’re interested in, but without any sort of aggregated online page it’s not clear that it’s worth the effort of re-entering your data.

8hands currently supports Twitter, Flickr, a variety of hosted blogging services including Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad, YouTube, and a few others. Support for FaceBook, Friendster and more is promised in the “coming soon” category. Even though it’s working with a Web 2.0 world, 8hands itself is a desktop application (Windows now, Mac promised). After creating an account and entering your details for the supported services, 8hands gives you a desktop window that resembles an instant messaging client – indeed, one of the things you can do is start a chat session with other 8hands users on any of your networks. You can also see things as they’re added to your networks (think of this as a specialized RSS reader), and share content from networks to users by drag and drop. The key problem here is that the application is most useful only if your friends are members of your social networks and 8hands users, so there’s a double adoption curve to consider.

MyLifeBrand lets you manage multiple social networks, including LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace, FriendSter, and others, in a single unified web interface. The service is currently in closed alpha, and you need an invitation to join. If and when you get in, you’ll find your other communities running in frames within the MyLifeBrand shell. They also maintain a single master friends list for you, so you can stop worrying about which people you know where.

So far, I think, we’re in the early days of social network and identity aggregation. While these three services are interesting for what they do, I don’t think any of them has hit the sweet spot that will enable massive uptake just yet. As with the social networks themselves, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: these aggregated services will become useful only if they get a large number of users, but they won’t get a large number of users unless they’re useful. I’m still waiting for the killer feature set that would get me to pull together and re-enter all of my account information yet again – how about you?

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