DandyID a home for online profiles

First there was Friendster, followed by Bebo and MySpace. Then came Facebook, with a flood of other social-networking Web sites following in its wake – not to mention other sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, which added their own social-networking tools.
The proliferation of social media outlets in recent years has posed a challenge to users, who must manage their online identities across a host of different sites. That’s where DandyID,created by a year-old Providence startup, comes in.
DandyID is meant to be a central place for people to manage, index and integrate their various social-networking profiles. Thus, when you get a new job, you can change your employer information on DandyID.org, and it will automatically update the information on third-party sites that sync with DandyID. In addition, people who know you from one site can check DandyID to see where else you live online.
The startup was founded last April in Boulder, Colo., by Sara Czyzewicz, Arron Kallenberg, and Anthon Dimitre. (The company is called Olive Interactive; DandyID is the product.) They met through TechStars, a program in Boulder that provides seed capital and mentoring to startup firms.
Czyzewicz – a Pawtucket native and Rhode Island College graduate – and her two partners decided to move the firm’s offices to Providence last August because of the city’s growing tech community and the difficulty they had finding enough talented workers in tech-saturated Boulder. In addition to the three co-founders, the site employs a full-time developer and a consultant who handles marketing duties.
DandyID’s creators say their site is helping to solve the issue of “online identity dispersion,” which Kallenberg described as “the idea that pieces of you are scattered everywhere [online]. This is a pretty obvious, in-your-face problem for anybody that uses the Web.” Kallenberg, for example, did not know his own sister had a MySpace page until he saw it listed on her DandyID page.
DandyID is part of a growing group of sites that aim to help people keep control of their identity on the Internet; others include ClaimID and Cliqset. “We’re not trying to be another social network,” Kallenberg explained. “We’re trying to be, basically, a portability platform for your identity.” Kallenberg said the feedback to DandyID so far has been extremely positive, with a lot of early adopters praising the site on the trendy micro-blogging site Twitter – itself another service that can be integrated with DandyID.
Olive Interactive has received two rounds of angel investments so far: a seed round last April, and then a larger round that came last summer after the firm got acquisition overtures from a few larger tech companies. To make money – a perennial challenge in the social-media world, where sites can have trouble translating visitors into revenue – Kallenberg said the company plans to create DandyID pro accounts, which would give subscribers additional tools to manage their identities and monitor traffic on their various social-network profiles.
DandyID’s founders are “on to something,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist who studies social networking at the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project in Washington, D.C. The service is likely to appeal to the “subset of people who believe in a certain sense of personal authenticity … and in kind of claiming everything that you do” online, she said.
However, Lenhart continued, that description does not fit everyone. Some people will want to keep their various online identities separate.
“The majority of people who have different profiles in different places – many of them, though not all of them, say they do it to kind of keep part of their life separate, whether that’s personal from professional, or hobby from other hobby,” Lenhart said.
“Certainly, I think there’s probably a market for DandyID, but certainly there’s a whole lot of people who wouldn’t be interested in it, either,” she added. •
Correction: The original version of this article said Sara Czyzewicz graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design; she is a graduate of Rhode Island College. In addition, a sentence was reworked to clarify that third-party sites must sync with DandyID to update users’ information.