Social Networks
Chi.mp
Overview
Chi.mp is a website for you to aggregate your online network and manage your identity. In other words this is a contacts manager with social networking attached to it - it is a website to build your own full profile adding feeds from Twitter, Delicious and more. In this way it is a new form of social networking by operating on the web through your own domain. The first task is easy: importing all your contacts from your other sources e.g. Gmail. You then need to integrate them into an address book. This is not so straightforward as you need to divide them up across different personas. This is unnecessarily confusing and time consuming.
You are obliged to create three personas and allocate contacts to each of them. Public, Work and Friends. The premise here is that the contacts will use the site and you have content that should be seen by different contacts. Or it may be a whole lot of work that sees little traffic to justify it. Following up on the Twitter and Facebook trend you are given your own .mp domain name.
Unfortunately Chi.mp lacks a serious professional look and feel compared to, say, Facebook. It directly competes with Friendfeed on aggregation (but with fewer feeds), Plaxo on friends, and LinkedIn on its work profile. Finally, it makes heavy weather of all of this with many features hidden away. July 2009.
Chi.mp
Conclusions
This is an ambitious attempt at creating a contacts-based all things to all users social media identity site that aggregates your content. It falls down on a UI that is not user friendly enough to make the tasks straightforward. It is taking on generalist and specialist sites and ending up being average at many things. Overall, you are being asked to put in a lot of hard work without the guarantee that Chi.mp has the profile.
Related Apps
Brazen Careerist
Overview
Brazen Careerist is a professional network for Generation Y. It works in the same vein as LinkedIn but uses social networking tools that work with a “younger generation” – blogging, and groups (although LinkedIn use these). Critically it reworks the status bar made ubiquitous by Twitter as an ideas bar. It also twists the Twitter “follow” and Facebook “friends” into being a fan others, presumably based on their ideas stream.
The new site is a revamp of Penelope Trunk’s blog network and book of the same name. Launched in August 2009 it aims to attract Generation Y high flyers who may find LinkedIn too old and Facebook too social, but will find the idea of a professional network with Facebook’s approach more to their taste. Brazen Careerist’s niche is that Generation Y will share their ideas and interests, and ultimately land a job while doing so.
As a social/professional Network, Brazen Careerist follows the professional set up route of asking you to fill in a form based on your resume. That’s the easy part. After that it’s all about ideas and sharing them through your status bar, blog and groups. The site integrates with Facebook Connect. It also lets you import your own blog's feed to fill in, or augment, your "ideas" area. There is no denying the site bears more of a resemblance to Facebook than LinkedIn, but attractively so. As a beta it has bugs – the upload from the resume form was painfully slow and, having completed this stage it then denied me access to my own profile. It’s early days and this shows through the apparent lack of blogs and groups to link and join.
The site is clear but quite basic: there are no widgets to add, no wall to post jobs on, no way of deleting idea postings. The settings page is America-centric. August 2009.
Brazen Careerist
Conclusion
As a new social/professional network, Brazen Careerist needs publicity and early adopters to get the word out. Ultimately, traction will come from the proposition that Generation Y have work-related ideas they wish to share. Bloggers are critical here but interestingly Twitter is absent as a connected tool. However, its real challenge maybe that as a part-social network it maybe blocked from company websites preventing its users use it as a work tool.