Chi.mp To Offer Free .MP URL’s

Chi.mp will be offering free .mp domain names to social networking site users starting September 1. In an announcement made by dotMP, trade mark holders have until that time to register their trademaked domains before the free offer commences.

Free is always a great selling word, but I smell a marketing ploy. Count the buzzwords and name dropping in this

The decision by Google, Yahoo and AOL to adopt OpenID, a system of federating and authenticating between domains, has caused a radical shakeup in the social network market. Social networks are moving from networks within a domain where a user has a profile to a network between domains where the user hosts their own site and connects with other users’ sites in an open social network. This significant change in the social networking space, combined with personal users ability to get a .mp domain for free from September 1st will dramatically change the domain market and open it to hundreds of millions of new entrants. The potential for these users to secure and create a domain that infringes a trademark is higher than it has ever been.

Chi.mp is building a flexible, permanent home for your online identity on your own domain. You own and are in control of the facets of your digital life, not any one service provider.

One place for your profile, your contacts & content, where you have control over who gets to see what.

This is what I think Chi.mp is: it’s sort of FriendFeed, it’s sort of Plaxo, but most important of all you get your own domain name with it. Could it possibly be the first of the real two way social aggregators like the promise of Google’s SocialStream? We’ll be keeping an eye on this.