Tupalo.com, the Vienna-based service for what’s cool around your neighborhood, yesterday announced a partnership with Herold, the Austrian service for business listings.

It’s a great move for the little company and I’m really happy for them.

And while I don’t believe in things like good and evil, I do have a bit of a queasy feeling when it comes to Herold. Not so long ago, they were getting a thorough beating when they announced the availability of a CD-ROM that contained the data of more than 4 million private people. While it’s legal, people were and still are up in arms about it. Which I totally understand.

Now, while I do believe Mike from Tupalo when he announces on their blog that they “will still continue as the lightweight, independent company we’ve always been”, I wonder whether people will still feel the same way, now that a company with such a backstory is part of the game.

I’m convinced that from a business perspective, the partnership between Tupalo and Herold was one of the best things that could have happened to them. Whether it’ll put off users concerned about their private data and how it’ll be treated, remains to be seen.

Last.fm today announced that they will be charging users from outside the US, UK and Germany 3 € per month if they want to keep using the last.fm radio. From their blog:

There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio. Everything else on Last.fm (scrobbling, recommendations, charts, biographies, events, videos etc.) will remain free in all countries, like it is now.

Now, I don’t believe that everything on the Interwebs should be for free. I’ve actually been a last.fm subscriber for quite a while, and I didn’t mind then that the service they provided for me was in fact inferior to what they provided in the above mentioned three countries.

But now, I feel a bit screwed over. I’m angry, but not at last.fm (well, there is a bit of rage there, but that’s purely emotional, not rational). I’m sure that the people who are put on the frontline, the ones that have to put up with the anger now unloading on them via their blog’s comments, are not the ones making decisions like these. They just want a great product and they want everyone to enjoy what they built.

Which used to be a viable idea on the Internet. You know, when it was still possible for everyone all over the world to enjoy what someone from a totally different place had decided to put online. Nowadays? Not so much. With all that bullshit about licensing deals, great services like last.fm, Pandora or even Youtube are going down the fucking drain because some suits think they need to squeeze every possible penny out of the rights they acquired in a world long gone and unfit for today’s technical advances.

It’s a shit world.

Here’s a service for everyone who’s always wanted their own website but didn’t know how and what to put on it. Chi.mp solves these problems for you.

First of all, you get a free domain name, ending in .mp. Now, it’s not the prettiest top level domain, but apparently the company reached an agreement with the government of the CNMI (Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands) that basically allows them and only them to register domains ending in .mp.

So after signing up, you’re the proud owner of a domain name. In a way. But more about this later.

With your new domain name, you also get a full-fledged personal website complete with a lifestream, the option of creating different versions for different contacts and a contact manager for the services you’ve hooked up to your site, like Flickr, Facebook or Twitter.

It’s fairly customizable, but in the end it’s basically a standalone profile that identifies you on the web. Your .mp domain also doubles an OpenID, which I think is a splendid idea. When you’re done configuring and hooking up your other services to the site, it will look like this.

It’s all very easy to configure, obviously geared toward people who haven’t yet created profiles on every social network there is (someone like me, in case you’ve missed that).

Oh, and a word about the domain name. The whole service is free, for the time being, including that .mp domain name. That is, it’s free if you use the rest of the Chi.mp service, but if you want to use your domain for something else, say a website about your anime collector’s dolls, you need to buy it for 20 USD a year. But considering that the whole idea behind Chi.mp is the creation of a profile and the interaction between all the .mp profiles created, buying that domain-name seems pointless. Especially if you can get ordinary .com domains for much less.

The service is still in private beta, so if you feel you’d like to try it out, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll send you an invitation (make sure to use a valid email-address or the invitation key will never reach you).

Update: All the invites are gone, sorry. But do leave a comment anyway.