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