Michael Myers

Now You too can Have Opposable Thumbs on Your Feet!

In #persona
06/05/2009
4 Min read
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I’ve been talking about online personas enabling marketers to create personalized marketing and questioned whether it will live in your browser or your social network. I ‘ve also listed the challenges and in the end the benefits of having multiple personas.

Now, three companies that don’t rhyme with Poogle, Fritter or Pacehook are creating an online persona aggregator.

chi.mp – The tagline for chi.mp is Content Hub & Identify Management Platform and it allows you to import your various profiles (LinkedIn,  Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr, etc.) along with your blog, IM, email addresses, physical address. You can also import all your contacts and content create with your profiles. As you enter your information you get to select whether your information is accessible to the public, co-workers,  and/or friends. According to Compete, their traffic is just below 60,000 unique visitors. I haven’t completed out my profile but it says my status is Big Chimpin! Funny.

DandyID – First smart move that I see; they let you import your chi.mp site. I found them when I posted the question of chimp usage on Twitter. Whomever is in control of media/interaction began to follow me. I also see that there is a a pro version (w/ analytics) and they had a great matrix that showed the benefits; that I can’t seem to find now. According to Compete their traffic is just below 20k. I have to root for these guys because they’re from Boulder. It is amazing how many niche networks (must be a member to view) a person can join. They seem to have a much more robust list of social networks than chimp. They have a widgets/plugins page that allows you to share your identity on other sites, such as a plugin for WordPress. This is a great way to be pro-active with your identity and allows for relationships between personas to be established over time as pe0ple friend one another in various venues. This is a powerful tool and therefore seems like a fit for power users. Maybe a DandyID lite would be in order for folks like my Mom. I do have to say after reviewing this the only thing I can think is that Google should buy this.

yiid (Your Internet ID) – According to Complete they are sitting at just over 4000 unique visitors and this site appears be somewhere between chi.mp and Dandy in regards to functionality. They are based out of Germany and the site design is awesome. Simple and capable. They also have reporting and a more raw widget (code based). I’d tell you more but I’m exhausted from filling out all the information from chi.mp and DandyID.

Now all this is great and yet there is the ever present force of those businesses unmentioned (rhyme time) above. If I were Firefox or Facebook, I’d be looking to these businesses to see what they should be doing. There is an obvious chance for any of these businesses to be acquired (DandyID => Google and chi.mp => Facebook) if they can keep developing compelling offerings. As I’ve said before; the concept of one unified online persona is going to happen and now that I think of it, I’m surprised they did not ask for my mobile phone specifically. Partnering with carriers to find out where their members do during the day would surely add to the richness of the data.

As for short term monetization, these businesses could provide some pretty amazing marketing/advertising to their user base. They have access to all the persona’s the user has chosen to share and could quickly identify some niche target markets. Time will tell.

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By Michael Myers 06/05/2009
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Michael Myers