What’s Ahead for chi.mp in 2010
As we roll into the year 2010 here at chi.mp, we’ve spent some time reflecting on how chi.mp has evolved and what our goals are as a company. To ensure that chi.mp continues to progress we have decided that we need to focus on doing what we do best: give away free .mp domains on which people can build their own personal web sites. To accomplish that goal we’ve begun making changes to chi.mp and will continue to do so throughout the year.
The first significant change we made was to reduce the amount of aggregated content we store. We found that the vast majority of requests were for the most current aggregated activity items, however we were storing well over 20 million content records, most of which were never being seen. To help stabilize the chi.mp system and improve its performance we reduced the total number of content items that we store in any given service subscription. By making this change we’ve been able to greatly reduce page load times across all chi.mp sites and dramatically reduce outages, which is good for all of us.
The next major change was the removal of the Ultimate Black Book. Contact management is a business in-and-of itself and to be done right it must be the primary focus of the business. While the Ultimate Black Book is a cool idea we will never be able to give it the attention that it deserves and requires to become an ubiquitous contact manager. To that end we have removed the Ultimate Black Book from the chi.mp interface. If you would like to download a vCard with all of your contacts you can do so by logging into your chi.mp site and going to the View My Site : Following. The full vCard download will be available until the end of March.
So that covers what has been removed, now here’s what we’re changing and adding:
First we’ll be completely revamping personas. The current implementation is not being widely used and so we’re going to fix it. We’ll be doing away with OpenID-based log in for your guests and instead let you create custom subdomains that represent your various personas. This means that sharing a persona will be as easy as giving out a URL. It also means that you can have multiple public personas which will open up new possibilities on how personas can be used.
We’ll also be adding support for subdomains redirecting to other sites. For example, you might want to direct http://photos.yoursite.mp to your Flickr or Picasa profile.
Both of these features will be available under a new pro package, which will be a paid upgrade for chi.mp site owners. We’re also moving email forwarding to the pro package and will add the ability to forward more than one email address from your chi.mp site to other email addresses.
You may have noticed that we’ve changed Contacts to Following. We want to make it really easy for you to see what all of your chi.mp friends are up to and thus we’re adding a feature that will aggregate all of your chi.mp friends’ content into a single page so you can see their activity streams in a single location.
Finally we want to make sharing a more important aspect of your chi.mp site. To do this we’ll be adding a Promote link on your chi.mp site that will provide sharing tools as well as widgets that you can embed on other sites.
Chi.mp is all about you, and having a personal web site that brings together everything about you on your free domain. We look forward to a year of focus and improvement for chi.mp and hope that you continue to share the journey with us.
Sincerely,
The chi.mp Team
27 Comments
January 14th, 2010 at 07:52pm
Thanks for the update Anthony. A lot of changes, it seems. I am most concerned about the personas. It’s my favorite feature of chi.mp — it’s the way social network privacy really should work; unfortunately, none of the major players care much about that, so I’ve relied on chi.mp personas as an intermediate privacy layer. Sad to see the right solution be replaced by an easy solution. Will non-pro users lose personas altogether?
January 14th, 2010 at 10:25pm
Peter,
We’ve wrestled with personas quite a bit, both from trying to explain them to the actual implementation of them. Our analytics data currently shows very little use of personas among the chi.mp community, and we feel that the current implementation may be partially if not mostly to blame for that.
Our approach to persona changes is one of pragmatism rather than idealism. We want to create privacy features more chi.mp owners can and will use, and that means rethinking the current implementation. If we can take a step back and make it work right for more owners then perhaps we can figure out how to also make it work more securely for the owners that want stronger privacy protection.
As for non-pro users losing personas - under our current plan the answer is yes. We consider personas a power feature and intend on having it provide enough value to be worth paying for.
January 15th, 2010 at 05:53am
I think this is not a cool idea to move email forwarding feature to pro package because many of your current users are using their chi.mp email addresses as primary email address and you’re forcing them to upgrade to pro package just for an email address. I suggest you move having more than one forwarding email feature to pro package and let free users have their one forwarding email address for free forever.
Thank you.
January 15th, 2010 at 07:51am
As I can see, all the changes are for power users. For free users, things are getting much worse. Its all about money, and its disappointing.
January 15th, 2010 at 09:13am
Mahdi,
If you already have an email forwarding set up then you will get to keep the single email forwarding that you’ve set up without having to pay for it. If you want more than one email forwarding then you’ll have to upgrade.
January 15th, 2010 at 09:56am
Quester,
I can understand your disappointment, however chi.mp must be sustainable. As you can imagine it takes a good amount of money to develop and operate chi.mp and thus we have fixed costs that need to be covered. I should also note that we will continue to improve the existing features that are core to the chi.mp goal of enabling personal publishing. For example, also included in this release was some improvements to photo uploading to make that process smoother and easier to use. Additionally as part of the changes expected for 2010 we’re revamping service subscriptions and going to make it easier to add lots of various feeds and we’re working on the following and sharing features as well - which will also be free. Bottom line: we need to make money to keep chi.mp going, but at the same time we are going to continue working on and improving free features as well.
January 17th, 2010 at 07:11am
I think it’s quite impressive that you can get your own domain with included features to have a profile and life stream for free at the moment. If the Pro features are reasonably priced I’ll be subscribing. Chi.mp’s financial security makes it more likely that what we’ve got now will stay around - and it’s definitely far less hassle than buying your own web space and maintaining your own profile and lifestream - by a long way.
January 17th, 2010 at 11:16am
Anthony,
I understand that, and I have to apologize - I was just a little upset by all these changes. Looking forward to the new free features in future :)
January 20th, 2010 at 11:09pm
Thanks for your response Anthony! It is certainly not the first time I have been accused of being more of an idealist than a pragmatist. :) Then again, it is not my business on the line.
Have you considered releasing a self-hosted version of chi.mp (like the Wordpress model)? It seems that doing so would both lower your fixed costs, and ease the problem of your needing to store millions of past status updates, as these would then be hosted by the users themselves.
January 21st, 2010 at 03:04am
Not sure whether I understand all of this, but what I’m certainly not clear about is: will my chi.mp account remain my OpenID?
I signed up with you because this was the first service that made OID understandable, manageable and easy.
If you’re not maintaining that bit, I’d have to switch back to another service - again. Looks like OID is still far away from being that: a stable open standard…
In any case, good luck with the endeavours. I’ll keep following you guys.
January 21st, 2010 at 07:07am
Nils,
Your chi.mp account will definitely remain your OpenID, we have no plans of changing that.
January 21st, 2010 at 07:08am
Peter,
We’ve consider it, and will continue to keep it as an option, however making the code downloadable and installable in a clean and easy to use fashion would require some significant work on our part. There are lots of moving bits at the moment and it’s packaged specifically for our servers. It is on the radar as a possibility in the future though.
January 21st, 2010 at 01:22pm
One question in context of changes for 2010: how about making something like direct webspace access available for storing files with text only? It would then look like the user uploads all the html or txt or whatever files to his account’s webspace, and all the pictures etc can be embedded from somewhere else. When moving further with idea of accounts, let’s imagine there is kinda (restricted) shell access to the hosting server and some software on that server, and by changing setting files in his home directory manually in shell session (ssh) or over web interface user can configure which services his homepage uses and which not (most services are not used by default) which should lead to less load for the server. If you want to provide paid services then you just make some programs or scripts, nothing all too complex, and their databases where data is stored which users the one or another paid service is enabled for. Don’t know of the others but I don’t really need all theese lights and whistles and so on, a text-only website would be not only enough but also kinda desired, as some people prefer surfing over console browsers like lynx, which do not support any graphics, and not GUI things like Firefox. I think it’s enough of speech for the beginning, it’s always possible to dream a little bit more. So just - how about that? Would it be possible?
January 21st, 2010 at 01:28pm
Babam, it was posted without the name. Just to be polite or so I say explicitly, the previous post was from me. When i first sent it there were some technical problems, so I had to re-send it, thanks to my Internet provider, and this time it was posted just with “Mr” as name, not with my real nickname.
January 28th, 2010 at 06:53pm
With the multiple domains, I would appreciate a auto-generated sitemap.xml file - or at least an atom feed with just our chi.mp urls - to help with the aggregation and promotion on Bing and Google.
February 5th, 2010 at 08:14am
I want to redirect my .mp domain to my personal site via dns or url forwarding at free of cost. Is it possible?
February 19th, 2010 at 05:40am
Seems like my mail-Address is not really working.
Tried several times to send mail to it, but nothing comes back (even no failure report!)
Seems like I will have to switch my mail address again, if i cant rely on .mp :(
February 19th, 2010 at 08:53am
We do not currently offer, nor do we plan on offering, redirection via DNS or URL forwarding free of charge.
Sincerely,
Anthony Eden
February 19th, 2010 at 09:26am
KaWie, I believe I see the issue. I’ll send you an email directly to explain.
February 20th, 2010 at 10:01am
With WiMaxx on the way communities are seeking IDs for folks living
on the same street - to alert of prowlers, have you seen my kid, my pet
and such msg vs. shouting out the window. You folks have any interst
in such opportunities? I’ve yet to convince a actress/model of your
utility vs the MySpace emails ONLY within thier email system as a means
of promotion. I’m noticing that alot of artist WEBsites are really just
a aggregate of all their events, tweets, facebooking, for which they may
pay for comment/review storage - I just love biz dev :)
AND looking to new persona’s menu. AND those need be “verified” IDs.
April 6th, 2010 at 12:41pm
I didn’t like all the changes, but I really like the service, and I believe it is useful. Let me thank you for your beautiful work that is the chi.mp domains. I hope you find the best answers to the users needs.
I liked the personas (hehe).
Kenny Hard.
May 9th, 2010 at 08:09am
I plan to upgrade to a pro account. I have just started using this. I really like the personas. I understand why it can’t be free. ..one reason I am starting to edge away from facebook is that it is just too hard to control privacy.
May 19th, 2010 at 01:50pm
I want to upgrade to pro but I have not credit card. Why you don’t accept paypal for upgrade?
June 18th, 2010 at 07:01pm
Nice…………….Keep it up……….
July 15th, 2010 at 03:31pm
Hi,
I understand the need to make money, but personas was the only reason I used this site (and easy registering for sites isn’t worth paying for to me). It’s the way openID is supposed to work (at least from what I understand). Imagine my surprise when I tried to use my chi.mp account to register for a site and it was drawing information in that I had previously set to friends only! I logged in to my site and found out that my private information was being displayed on the website. I unfortunatly had to remove all of my information and won’t be using this as my openID source anymore. I liked the nice simple url, but without personas I will go back to using one of my other openID providers. I can’t trust a site to be my single point of entry, that will just eliminate privacy settings with no warning.
July 15th, 2010 at 05:36pm
I’m sorry that we let you down. I assure you that we take data privacy very seriously and we would never have intentionally shared any private or privileged data without your permission. When we switched over to personas as part of the Pro upgrade, all non public data was supposed to be made private. If we made a mistake during that switch then I hope you will accept my apology.
Sincerely,
Anthony Eden
Sincerely,
Anthony Eden
July 26th, 2010 at 06:19am
I must say that I agree to most of the things Widmer said, the main reason that I use Chi.mp is (or was) the personas and OpenID. It is very sad that you removed personas! And after this update, Chi.mp has been less user friendly, and from what I have experienced from the free version, this service is nothing I would ever paid for as it works today.
The only time I will ever use Chi.mp again is to login to a site using OpenID.