Bytemarks

There’s a new web identity aggregator in town and it is called Chi.mp. What makes these guys extra special are their strong Hawaii and Pacific Island connections. Gib Bintliff, Chairman and President graduated from Iolani in 1978. Back then he was known as Jonathan. I know this because I got the Annual. In fact I am now going to have to get him to sign my Annual like I did with Guy Kawasaki. But I digress. The Chi.mp folks had a meetup this past week at P.F. Changs in Honolulu to introduce themselves and the product to some of the local geek community. The idea of identity aggregation has been floating around for a while. Mike Gunderloy wrote an introductory article to the subject in Web Worker Daily back in 2007. Since then FriendFeed seems to have gained the most momentum. Now along comes Chi.mp. The novelty here is that with Chi.mp they give you (at no cost) your domain name of choice to aggregate the various identities you’ve created on the web. For example I’ve registered Bytemarks.mp and have aggregated my Twitter and Flickr accounts on Bytemarks.mp, i.e. what gets displayed on Twitter and Flickr gets feed to Bytemarks.mp. Right now Chi.mp is in alpha meaning it is still in the early stage of their release schedule. Not everything is working yet. Currently they only aggregate three services, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. For me at least, the Twitter feed is not working and the Flickr feed isn’t updating with current photos. I also noticed that when you add a friend and then your friend adds you, you will end up with two appearances of your friend in your friend list. I am sure these are all being worked on and Chi.mp will be an interesting service to follow. There is also an interesting story behind the .mp and Saipan connection but I will have to save that for an upcoming guest appearance on Bytemarks Cafe.