The folks at Gist are now joining the social identity management space by unleashing this functionality to the masses — giving everyone the ability to create and share their own public profile. Now I can now use the data-gathering power of Gist to present a full dossier about me.

Social identity management is a crowded market but Gist is entering it with a strong initial offering. Its public profiles are customizable and can contain a virtually unlimited amount of contact information and links to the various places that one exists on the social web, all accessible via a customized URL (here’s mine).

Each item from your personal record can be made visible or kept private in your public profile on an individual basis, while the news that Gist gathers can be filtered or limited based on keywords or other criteria to better present what’s displayed.

The news-gathering feature is what makes the Gist profile so compelling. Using the same technology that populates the contacts within your Gist account, your public profile can automatically show the most relevant information about you, your company and your presence on the web.

If you’re a Gist user, the public profiles of others can be easily integrated into your account as a means to add new contacts or to pull information into an existing contact.

I’d eventually like to see the data I present with a Gist profile be made available to other services via an API — this is the feature that I think makes DandyID the most compelling choice for identity management. However, the presentation is nice and I really like the privacy options for controlling just what information gets displayed. If you’re using the Internet as a promotional tool, and want to be found, setting up a complete Gist profile just makes sense.

Sign up for your Gist account, which is free during the public beta.

How do you control your social identity?

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You may recall that GizaPage has a different take than other similar services. Where most either pull or aggregate your content into their own interface, GizaPage’s tab format gives folks the ability to view all of your profiles in their natural context. While I found the initial release to be thoughtfully done, some of the new options make it a much more compelling option.

As the whole point of a consolidation or aggregation service like this is to allow greater visibility for your online activities, I like the addition of a widget that can be embedded on your web site or blog to point people to your other various social profiles via GizaPage. The 1-Click GizaCard is basic — I would like to see some more customization options — but it is functional.

One of the most exciting features is the addition of some basic stats functionality. Your dashboard will now show you views of your profile as well as more detailed breakdowns about your individual profile views. Obviously, this won’t track views outside of the GizaPage profile, but it is more visibility than a lot of services offer natively.

You can now assign a custom URL or web address for your GizaPage rather than using the standard one that they provide. This lets you use a domain or subdomain for your name or business. This is actually a paid option, but if you sign up before July 30 they’ll waive the $4.95/month fee for the first year.

They’ve also added some formatting and customization options to help spice up your profile pages. I’m intrigued to see what others come up with, as the defaults can be a bit drab. I chose a nice circuit board background for mine, which brightened things up and made it look much more “mine.”

GizaPage’s unique format makes it stand out among the multitude of choices available, so it’s worth investigating if you are evaluating a social identity service.

How do you manage your social identity?

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Thus, there are a number of sites that are intended to help put all of your online presences in one place. I’ve tried a few of these aggregators. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, so check them out, and see which options might work for you.

DandyID

Of the services I discuss here, DandyID is the easiest to set up, because it doesn’t try to do too much. This is a simple service that creates an online profile showing your name, bio, contact information, web links, and your online identities. You can specify your online identity for over 330 social networks, including sites from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Poland. Plus, you can add sites not on its list.

When you first sign up, DandyID has an option for importing contacts from services like Gmail, although the import failed for me, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to try again. I’m not sure what advantage you get from importing your contacts, anyway.

The profile page DandyID creates is very basic and not very customizable. But Facebook users may choose DandyID because it offers a very nice app that allows you to embed your online presences into your Facebook page.

Retaggr

Retaggr bills itself as “the modern day equivalent of a business card.” Aliza wrote about this service last year, and noted how it had improved a few months later.

When you sign up, you’re taken to a well-designed form where you provide Retaggr with information about yourself, and about the places you have online presences. I counted over 180 different social networks, and you can add sites not listed. (Apparently, you can import some of this information if you have a FriendFeed account, but that option didn’t work for me.) You can also add information about groups with which you are affiliated, and widgets allowing people to IM you directly.

You get three ways of displaying the information you’ve entered:

• A profile page on the Retaggr site (and which can be used with a custom domain name if you buy its premium service). The page can be set to display your status from Twitter and Facebook, blog entries and even pictures from Flickr.
• A virtual “business card” that can be embedded almost anywhere on the web, and in email signatures.
• An “add me” button that can be used to encourage others to connect with you.

ClaimID

While you can use ClaimID to list your profiles on social networks, the site is really about aggregating any web page or site that you wish to “claim,” either as author or subject. This is done by adding MicroID code to the web pages in question to show you have access to them.

So instead of offering you a list of social networks, as DandyID and Retaggr do, ClaimID offers a “Post to ClaimID” bookmarklet that you install in your browser, then click it whenever you want to add a site to your ClaimID page. You can then organize the links into categories and annotate them as you wish.

This site might be a good way for, say, writers or web developers to put together a portfolio, although if you don’t need ownership verification, it would be easy to produce a similar-looking site with basic web page editing tools.

GizaPage

As Scott discussed recently, GizaPage‘s concept is simple: One URL displays a series of tabs showing the social network sites you select. Web developers will recognize that this is essentially a “Web 2.0″ version of HTML frames, with options that allow the GizaPage owner to select who gets to see what. I like the concept, but the site seems often to be slow and buggy for me. But it has potential, and is definitely worth watching.

Chi.mp

By far the most comprehensive option for managing online identities is Chi.mp, which Darrell recently wrote about. Read his review for details; I’ll just say that Chi.mp offers many options that none of the above services do, notably:

• A custom domain name as a standard feature (optional with Retaggr).
• The ability to show different information to public, work and home groups.
• Some customization of the site’s template.
• Twitter-like posting of status and images.
• Contact management (Chi.mp calls it the “Ultimate Black Book”).

Because Chi.mp has so many features, it takes more setting up than the other options, and, I suspect, more maintenance. But it may be an attractive option for those who need a hub for their web presences, and are willing to spend the time to use its features to the fullest.

Conclusion

There are a number of other services for aggregating social network identities. Many of these products are in beta, or just don’t seem to work very well. I’ve tried a few, and will hold my opinions until we see how they develop. Like the social networking field itself, I’m sure that the best services will survive, and others will fade away.

For now, though, I found Retaggr to be the most useful service for managing online identities, although signing up for DandyID may be worth it just for the Facebook app.

How do you manage your social identities?

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One of the challenges is that the connections I’ve made through one service have a hard time finding me on the others. GizaPage, a new service launching in beta today, hopes to make that process easier.

When you sign up for GizaPage, you get a customizable URL (for example, mine is scottblitstein.gizapage.com) which can serve as a dashboard of sorts for all of your online profiles. Currently supporting over 40 services, you pin your accounts together to create a virtual catalog of your online presence. Connections can browse through your tabs to see where else you are active.

GizaPage isn’t an aggregator in the traditional sense. Unlike something like FriendFeed, which pulls your updates from the various sites it supports, GizaPage lets people view your full profile pages in a convenient tabbed environment.

The tabbed interface is also a convenient way for me as a user to be able to easily access all of the profiles I’ve added from one place.

One of the most compelling features of GizaPage is the built-in privacy controls. You can establish a public profile but then also include, or pin, additional profiles that are only viewable to those that you have connected with. Also, because you are just presenting your publicly available profiles from the various sites you use, there is no need to share your login information with GizaPage.

The process of connecting with friends was a bit odd, though. I was given the option of importing my contacts from Gmail, for example, but it never really told me what it was going to do with that info. I imagine it will show me if any of those folks have a page of their own, but a bit more help and information during the import process would be helpful.

The concept of personal branding is a hot topic right now. A well-populated GizaPage could be a good compliment to Google’s recent Profile enhancements. My GizaPage profile isn’t yet showing up in a Google search, but as the service is adopted by more people, its search ranking will likely improve over time.

Creating a GizaPage is currently free, but expect an option for premium services to be available in the future.

How do you maintain your online personal brand?

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