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.