Unite Your Online Identity With Chi.mp

There has recently been a lot of chatter on about a not-so-new service called Chi.mp. Nobody really seems to know what what to do with it, but everyone is searching frantically for an invite. 

What’s Chi.mp?

Chi.mp stands for “Content Hub & Identity Management Platform”. It’s a central point for your content and also serves as your identity on the web. Many of us need something to connect and unify our personas online. There are a lot of services that scratch the surface of this idea, but most only collect your data from other services and many are full-fledged social networks in their own right. This means you’re just adding another site to keep up with. 

When you sign up for Chi.mp, you’ll be given your own personalized .mp domain (mine is geekpi.mp). You have the ability to connect with all your other services, pulling in content and providing links to your other social networks and sites. 

Centralize Your Identity

With your Chi.mp domain, you have one central location where people can find you and branch out to your other profiles. You can display basic contact info, set up an email address on your domain which forwards to your real email address, and push your status to Twitter and Facebook. Chi.mp can also import and merge your contacts from your various services and allows you to manage them all in one place. 

Not only does Chi.mp serve as a unified profile, but your .mp domain also allows you to sign into any site that supports OpenID. Having your own domain that identifies you by it’s content and also authenticates you elsewhere is quite interesting.

What’s Missing

Chi.mp is a cool service, but everyone I speak to has that all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go vibe. In it’s current form, it’s not very useful except for the OpenID feature. Facebook, Bebo, FriendFeed, Strands and others already aggregate your content for you. 

It’s still in private beta, but Chi.mp will need to provide more interaction with your social networks if it plans to actually be the hub for your online identity and differentiate itself from similar services. I definitely look forward to seeing what new features develop and I can’t be mad at a service that gives me my own free domain.

What are your thoughts on Chi.mp? What do you use it for? If you need an invite, you might search the Invites room on FriendFeed or find one on Twitter.