Once it was just a problem of the tech-affine early adopter crowd, but now it is spreading into the mainstream more and more: profiles on too many websites. People are on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Xing, and it’s easy to lose track of where users registered accounts already. So there was a demand for profile aggregation services pretty early. And yes, there are many.
A fairly unknown service so far is DandyID, although it was launched in May of last year already. It aggregates profiles from more than 180 sites and consolidates them in a single place. Though DandyID doesn’t stop there. It also helps discovering its users’ friends on those sites as well. And along the way, it supports many open standards.
Sign Up and Profile
OK, let’s get started with DandyID and see how it works (and maybe how it could work better). First is the pain of registering an account:
Well, that’s a standard sign up form – apart from the “transgender” option” – we all have seen many times. I have never seen the trangender option before, though, and I am wondering if it will be clicked at all. Anyway, if “transgender” was dropped from the form all required fields could be filled via OpenID‘s Simple Registration extension. No user interaction, just some magic done by OpenID. Hell, DandyID could be a Relying Party. Go for it, dear folks at DandyID!
After signing up a long list of available services is waiting for new users. Nightmare, 180+ services!
But, fear not! Even if users have signed up for 50 of those services they don’t have to manually enter all their usernames. One username should be enough, and DandyID shows more accounts belonging to the user directly under that service. It looks like this:
That’s cool, although I think this could be displayed more user friendly. Currently, I have no idea how this could be improved, though. Anyway, all this magic is done with Google’s Social Graph API, if I am not completely wrong. Very nice. Though the Social Graph API is also able to find my friends which are registered with DandyID. So all I have to do is add them. No more looking for the usual suspects on DandyID. I think, I hate adding friends even more than filling out stupid sign up forms. My friends are marked up with XFN then, by the way.
It’s time to finetune my profile now, like adding an address. Fortunately, DandyID also supports the hCard microformat. So all I have to do is providing a link to an hCard on the web and my address is added to my profile.
Since I added my Twitter account, my last status update is also shown.
OpenID Delegation
While I am missing sign up with OpenID, the DandyID profile URL can work as an OpenID. Though DandyID is not an OpenID Provider but it delegates the profile URL to my OpenID Provider. This is a really cool feature because so far OpenID delegation just works for users who have control over a website themselves. With DandyID it is not required anymore to own a website.
However, I think this could be improved a little bit. MyOpenID and ClaimID were the only available OpenID providers to me because I added my usernames for those providers. But I also added my AIM, WordPress.com, Flickr, TypeKey, and MyBlogLog profiles. All those accounts can work as OpenIDs. Well, for the Yahoo! properties Flickr and MyBlogLog users have to opt-in to use them as OpenIDs but that could be asked by DandyID.
Update (2009-01-21, 00:04AM): Something changed since I had a look at this feature: WordPress.com is shown as a provider now.
Future
DandyID is still in beta but there are some new features planned already. First, there is “Permission” which is described as:
Eventually you will be able to manage which websites, services, and apps have access to your social graph. But, since we are in private beta this feature is not live just yet
I can just speculate but this is screaming OAuth to me. Considering that there is also an API available which supports Portable Contacts this would make sense.
Another feature will be “Launch-Pad” which will serve as a central point to log in to the various profiles. Well, this reads Password Anti-Pattern (see my former post on the topic). Not good.
Conclusion
While it doesn’t re-invent the wheel, DandyID looks quite interesting already. It seems the developers have a pretty good understanding of open standards and the open web in general. Though the forthcoming Launch-Pad doesn’t fit in here. It might be convenient for users but it is wrong, very wrong. But maybe it’s me who got Launch-Pad wrong.
