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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