This is the second in a series of application reviews - VRM Labs app catwalk. Our source are applications that are seen, claim to be or are mentioned in connection with VRM which are then reviewed according to VRM-based criteria. Suggestions of applications that you wish us to look are welcome. adriana dot lukas at gmail dot com. We aim to one every week.

I signed up for chi.mp beta testing some time ago and set up my account a couple of months back. I remember seeing their placeholder web page almost a year ago and thinking this sounds good:

Chi.mp is building a flexible, permanent home for your online identity on your own domain. You own and are in control of the facets of your digital life, not any one service provider. One place for your profile, your contacts and content, where you have control over who gets to see what.

And they mean it with the own domain! You get your own page with .mp. There is more goodness in their description of what chi.mp can do for you:

Chi.mp not only gives you a free .mp domain name, but also provides state of the art tools to help you brand yourself and publish your existing web service content, into a single easy to find domain. Import contacts from your favorite services and merge them into a single master list that you can export at any time. Chi.mp gives you a complete platform to unify, brand, and manage your ever growing Web identity.

screenshot of other web services, opens up full size on the same page

The nice thing about chi.mp is that you get a private space where you can aggregate everything you create with other platforms, without having to share with someone by default. It also gives you an ‘intergrated’ contacts book - you can import your contacts from each of the web services you use and aggregate them on chi.mp. There is a menu tab called ‘manage multiple’ displays all your contacts and allows you to merge multiple contacts into one. This would be a useful functionality, given that I can also export my contacts out of chi.mp. I’d import contacts from all my ’social media accounts’, survey them, merge them, tidy them up, dust and polish them, then export them in vCard format. As for email contacts I can only import those that allow me to export them in the same format.

screenshot of contacts export, opens up full size on the same page

Merging the contacts under the ‘manage multiple’ can be very satisfying, in a kind of OCD way, until I decided to test it further. I could see my friend Alice Baccini-Smith as my Facebook-imported contact and I also know that her Twitter name was madhousewife. I valiantly, and laboriously, went through all the combined Facebook and Twitter contacts that seemed to be ordered more randomly than aphabetically. I thought, aha, if I find Alice close to ‘m’, then it’s too far from her real name and not very user friendly. Imagine my surprise when I couldn’t find her at all. Ditto for Mark Earls aka herdmeister, but then I found out that his updates are protected. This means that those contacts that have a special setting within individual services/platforms will not get imported even though those people are part of my contact book.

Adding various services was as easy or as painful as with other platforms trying to get you add other web services to your account there.

I have already added twitter as my first service when I first set up the account. Adding Flickr was painless,

screenshot of Flickr authentication, opens up full size on the same page

… but Facebook had a bit of a hicup for me. In order to push updates back to Facebook from chi.mp it required another confirmation that I indeed want to give access to my Facebook stuff from my chi.mp account. My browser decided that I need to have cookies enabled in order to login and approve, so I gave up.

screenshot of facebook authentication, opens up full size on the same page

Things got even more complicate with importing contacts from Facebook. When I first added Facebook I didn’t tick the box import contacts from Facebook. As I continued playing with chi.mp, I decided to import them after all to see how the merge functionality works. I wasn’t able to simply update the settings for Facebook, in order to import contacts I had to add Facebook again, which created a replica of Facebook activity stream in my chi.mp dashboard. I found a way to delete it later, so not a big deal, just a bit clunky.

screenshot of duplicate facebook, opens up full size on the same page

As for other web services on my list, I didn’t add gmail but that’s just my paranoia kicking in. I did add a feed from my personal blog, Media Influencer, which worked smoothly. I imagine you can add feeds from anywhere, but I assume the idea is feeds from your own content… given it’s about your identity.

To add and authenticate other web services, you go to the menu section “On the Web”. Despite adding Friendfeed and dopplr and delicious, I couldn’t find them on the list of available services to activate them and add their content to my dashboard.

I thought this may have to do with different usernames or their format. And indeed, for dopplr, my username is different, it is in fact an email. I tried to use both that email and my displayed name. Same for Friendfeed, which displays a nickname, but use another of my emails for login. I tried again. Didn’t work. Obviously, I am missing a beat here but if those three services were crucial to my chi.mp identity, I’d miss out on them.

The Chi.mp secret sauce of managing your identity seems to be based on your ability to create personas, as many as you wish:

Personas are your tool for determining “who sees what” about you on your site. Each Persona can have its own theme, profile information, profile photo/avatar, and content. You can create as many Personas as you like. You can also assign and invite contacts to each Persona. You are now in control of “who sees what”.

screenshot of new persona, opens up full size on the same page

The default personas are set for the usual ones - public, work, friends.

screenshot of default personas, opens up full size on the same page

For me most of my friends are also part of my ‘work’ life which is rather public, though I am a private person. My privacy ‘policy’ is not reflected in my access management, but rather in how I relate to different people and in my behaviour. Others, though, may like the option of creating different ways of showing themselves to the world.

The more fundamental issue here is that building personas is an approach rooted in traditional identity notions of ‘we are different people to different audiences, or in different contexts and environments’. Though this is apparently true, I think this has always been a fallacy - even before the web has blown up the foolproof option of different identities without cross-contamination. I may behave differently so people see different aspects of me but that doesn’t mean I am a different person, a different persona. By putting emphasis on the persona, I become slave to my audiences and contexts who ’shape’ how I display my personas.

I guess what I am really getting at is that personas are hard work. I’d find it a chore if I had to decide BEFORE going to a party who I am going to be and what information I will divulge or share in the course of the party with people I meet there. It’s what I’d call a ‘closed’ approach to identity, not unlike being a spy. You have different passports, different stories depending on who you deal with. For most of us, with a more routine existence, it is easier to go to the party and talk to people according to our implicit privacy ’settings’ or policy. For those who value their privacy too high, any effort at separating their aspects of life and personas is worth investing. Some people share their life story or talk about personal issues with strangers, others wouldn’t discuss the weather for fear of unwittingly revealing their preferences.

The web has shifted identity and its fundamentals. I can still be private but I can also shape my identity rather than be defined by others or by ‘markers’ that I had no choice over - date of birth, gender and nationality.

Back to the criteria for the app catwalk:

Web services these days have to provide storage as well as functionality for our data, and so are de facto silos. So openness of most apps here can only be judged on whether they also behave like silos or not. This means export, data portability and open formats.

Chi.mp ranks high on behaving openly, not only you can import your stuff relatively easily but you can export all of it , if you wish. And in open formats such as XML, JSON files and previously mentioned vCard.

Site Export. You can now export your .mp site which includes a zip file that contains a vCard for all your contacts, your photos, blog posts, portable contact records, statuses in XML and JSON files.

This, just like contacts, could be useful for aggregation of your ‘activity streams’ and then exporting them in ways you possibly couldn’t, as a user, from individual web services such as Facebook or Twitter. One to note for the future…

screenshot of export your chi.mp, opens up full size on the same page

Once you decide to export everything, you get an email with a link to the data, that expires after 72 hours.

screenshot of the email, opens up full size on the same page

Alas, the link didn’t work for me. I am sure it can be fixed easily, perhaps chi.mp didn’t expect people exporting stuff just yet

screenshot of the error in export link, opens up full size on the same page

I have emailed their support and got quickly set up with a ticket. This was on Wednesday and I haven’t heard back from them by the time this review was going up. Will post an update once anything happens.

On data crunching side i.e. ability to manage, manipulate, analyse etc data gathered or created with the web app, chi.mp is mainly an aggregator of data from other web services. The main functionality, apart from collating your activity streams, which good but not unique (see Friendfeed, Plaxo Pulse etc), is the ability to display it and filter it through pre-defined personas. This is a feature that some may appreciated and despite my misgivings about this approach to my online identity above I’ll mark it as a step forward in the user-driven design.

The only data structure that I can see is around the personas.

Data type is personal data. When it comes to personal data I differentiate between its two meanings. One kind of ‘personal data’ means one’s address, date of birth, phone number, social security number etc etc. And the other kind, proliferating with the advent of the social web, is the ‘data pertaining to a person’. Chi.mp, whether by default or by design, contains both - ‘personal data’ through the personas and ‘data pertaining to a person’ through activity stream that aggregates my social web services.

Does or can user add value to the data? Not directly or significantly. There may be some value in consolidating my contacts from email and social networks and then exporting them in open format. And perhaps in the future, there may be further use for the user of the XML and JSON files in exported content. Still, it’s more than what most web apps and services currently allow (with shining exception of Dopplr and Wesabe).

Data sharing is again filtered or displayed around personas that you create and manage for the benefits of people you interact with. There is the public page, in my case http://adriana.mp which has a feed, which I successfully added to my feed reader.

Their attitude to data is explicitely covered in the chi.mp Services Addendum (bottom of the main page)

The CHI.MP Service is a content hub and identity management platform that lets you own and control your content and your identity. As an Owner and participant in the CHI.MP Service, you are the owner of your original content and your identity, and you may transfer your Customer Content to another service provider at any time.  This CHI.MP Addendum describes your rights and obligations as an Owner of the CHI.MP Service.

…and their position on data ownership is supported by users’ ability to delete and/or export accounts with full content.

Section 1 of chi.mp’s Privacy Statement (center bottom of the main page) contains the following:

SAIPAN DATACOM DOES NOT GIVE, SELL, RENT, LOAN, OR OTHERWISE DISCLOSE ANY Personally Identifiable Information TO THIRD PARTIES EXCEPT WHEN WE HAVE YOUR EXPRESS PERMISSION OR UNDER CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES DESCRIBED IN THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT.

As for payment model, as long as you host your data on their platform, your chosen .mp domain remains free. You can purchase your domain for $20 a year, presumably if you want to host your data yourself under that domain.

screenshot of purchase your domain, opens up full size on the same page

There is a neat service chi.mp has around OpenID:

• your chi.mp domain is also your OpenID.
• OpenID Trusts are entries you generate by using your OpenID on other sites and asked to trust them with your identity information
• you can delete such entries from the list when you no longer trust those sites with your identity information

It’s too early to identify chi.mp business impact on any supply chains or disintermediation. Best of luck with any of those, always good to see some in progress on that front!

Oh, and chi.mp have definitely joined the trends of the Web 2.0-cute fail page.

screenshot of fail page, opens up full size on the same page

Related links:
chi.mp
chi.mp blog