Manage Your Various Online Identities With Chi.mp

Many people often have accounts with sites like Facebook, Digg, YouTube, AIM, etc. and giving people access to all of these different contact methods in one place can be a hassle sometimes.

While other services like Retaggr offers this ability, newer services like Chi.mp offers more features that allows you to better manage your online identity and create your own site to share yourself and contact information with others.

When signing up for Chi.mp (which stands for Content Hub & Identity Management Platform), you’re able to choose your own personal .mp domain name for your site (which you can later buy for $20 a year) and create your site which isn’t just a list of places where you are on the internet – it’s an interactive place for your identity.

One of the features Chi.mp has that separates it from other services is the ability to create “personas” for your site and its visitors. Chi.mp’s Personas allows you to create different versions of your site depending on who your target visitor is.

For example, sites come with a default persona for Work/Business, Friends and another for the anybody (the public). Chi.mp offers you a personal “about me” page where you can list birthday, languages that you speak, phone numbers, contact addresses, emails, education (degrees), IM screennames and then control which persona each one gets displayed (or doesn’t) on (see left screenshot). People can then log into your site or be invited to come and view the persona they get assigned to. Chi.mp allows you to import and sync a contact list from outside services (Gmail and Flickr for example) and then assign personas to individuals or groups of people from there.

From your multiple personas, you can customize the backgrounds, favicons, avatars and site design for each one. So, you can display a professional work picture for your business persona and a kick-back smiling and happy shot that you took on vacation for your friends persona.

Each persona also has an activity stream you control which shows the latest content from sites you share with your Chi.mp site (Twitter for example). From the screenshot to the right, you can see how people can filter out things to a certain part of your activity stream. Your Chi.mp site’s URL also serves as an OpenID for you to use anywhere else.

Finally, your  site also has its own “microblog” and status app, similar to Twitter. With the Blog, you can create a post on your site, display it to certain personas and then display/link to it on external sites like Twitter. With the Status tool, you can publish statuses (as in the example on the top of the sidebar above) which will then appear on both your site and on Twitter.

Want to see my Chimp site for more on what it looks like? Visit my Chimp page at grantd.mp.  Then go to Chi.mp and sign up for your own page!

Do you use Chi.mp or a similiar service like Retaggr? How do they work for you in helping people connect to the services that you use?   Let us know in the comments.