Sara Czyzewicz is a co-founder of Olive Interactive LLC, a startup company that recently moved to Providence from Colorado. Czyzewicz and her partner, Arron Kallenberg, will present a service that they have developed, DandyID, at tonight’s Providence Geeks dinner, which will be held from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at AS220, 115 Empire St. in Providence. She talked with PBN recently about DandyID and how people will manage their many online identities in the years to come.

PBN: What’s the idea behind DandyID?

CZYZEWICZ: The social Web is in need of data-portability models. For example, a user on site A, B and C may have the same data, such as their name or their contact information, stored separately on each site. When an update needs to be made, it must be made directly on all three sites. Furthermore, the site developers are all building the same infrastructures for data collection, detracting from efforts toward their core value proposition. There’s a pain existing for users and for the sites on which they exist.

PBN: So how does DandyID address that?

CZYZEWICZ: DandyID provides a central access point for discovering and managing users’ identity data, and making it portable. By identity data, we are referring to where else users exist online; we support 154 sites, and that number grows each month.

For example, if site A, B and C were synced with DandyID, and a user provides their identity data to site A, that data is automatically sent to site B and C. Users can manage which sites are “synced” or not as well – perhaps she doesn’t want site C to receive data updates.

For developers and site owners, DandyID provides an API, or application programming interface, for implementing user data collection and syncing abilities with our data source. We are also building a set of enterprise-level widgets that interface with our API. For example, our service-collection widget, typically placed in a user settings page, allows users to discover, manage and sync their data to that site. This video explains it further.

PBN: Do people really want all of their online identities linked? People might have quite different online identities on Facebook versus, say, LinkedIn.

CZYZEWICZ: DandyID links to people’s public online identities. Thus, for many individuals, publicly claiming these identities won’t be a problem. But, circumstances may exist where anonymity is preferred – in which case, users can exclude certain identities from their DandyID set, or include them but turn “sync permissions” off for whichever sites they’d like to keep separate datasets for.

PBN: What’s the outlook for DandyID?

CZYZEWICZ: We’re getting more involved with the “Open Stack” community involving data portability and decentralized authentication; DandyID is using Google’s Open Social API for identity discovery, for example, and also plans to implement OpenID, oAuth and Portable Contacts. Soon we’ll expand identity data collection to include users’ cross-site contacts.

We are also launching a consumer application to create a single sign-on that can be used across multiple social sites, called DandyLP or “Launch-Pad.” This is currently in private beta – to request access, send me an e-mail at: sara6633@gmail.com.

PBN: Do you think there will come a day where we have a single login that we use across all Web sites?

CZYZEWICZ: I think one login across literally all Web sites won’t be realized. That would give tremendous power to a single host, which just isn’t the nature of the Internet. As described in “The Starfish and the Spider” by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, the Internet exists as a decentralized (“starfish”) organization – there is no single “head.”

That being said, current efforts towards single sign-on and authentication (OpenID, Windows Live ID, etc.) are greatly facilitating logins and authentication across a growing number of sites. As mentioned earlier, DandyID plans to soon support OpenID, as have many larger corporations. Furthermore, DandyID’s “Launch-Pad” enables single sign-on for one-click access to the multiple social sites we support. •