Ambient Avatars { for ambient intimacy

Embed your ambient avatar:

Please note: We need to adjust the thumbnail size for the avatar. Coming soon.

WTF?

Adventures in time and face. Chinposin may be for Fridays, but ambient avatars are an everyday thing. This is still a prenatal release, but we think the concept has legs.

When we built chinposin, we noticed that people like to play with their avatars, but there wasn't any way to track the changes. Frankly, we wanted to look at our own changes on an avatar timeline. So here it is. All you need to do is follow us on twitter.

And so now we’re storing your avatars on an ongoing basis. That wasn’t so painful now was it? We’re just at the very beginning though of what will hopefully be a long and interesting journey. It started with Friday chinposin, with its need to “update” your avatar with a twitter command. But we wanted to simplify things and this is the result.

Now if you follow @chinposin on twitter we’ll automatically store any changes to your avatar. There are some obvious privacy implications so it is important we state up front that the only information we’re storing are pictures. If you want to opt out now it’s as easy as unsubscribing from @chinposin. If you want us to delete any avatars we’ve already stored we’d be only happy to make them disappear in a puff of greasy black smoke. Another important note- when we started @chinposin we were a little free and easy about blogging and using flickr images that you tagged “chinposin”. But some of you had marked the pictures as “all rights reserved” which makes life difficult for us. While we promise never to use your images from twitter/ or flickr in another context without explicit permission to do so, its pretty obvious that be following @chinposin you’re opting into allowing us to store some avatar data, even if it’s just a picture.

It’s time for active avatars – and a sustainable opt-in community. That’s what we’re working on. If you have any issues or problems, or good ideas for new features please twitter them as an @reply to @chinposin or send an email to chris[at]yellowpark[dot]net or jgovernor[at]redmonk[dot]com.

  @afongen

Friday, May 16th

My last day in this job is full of meetings, starting now. 3:46pm

Finally got the offer letter this morning so my new job is official: I join our identity & access management team on Monday. 3:45pm

@chriskulish Sure, I'll email it later today. 3:41pm

Whipping up a basic Ajax example with YUI for a quick tutorial tomorrow. 2:38am

Friday, May 16th

@davekruse JS lib depends on what I'm doing. We default to YUI at MnSCU because of its kick-ass documentation. I'll blog an explanation. 12:38am

Pulling together intro Ajax resources for a coworker. Should focus on using YUI. 9:29pm

Tired of devs who admit that they're confused by and not good at UI work but dismiss it as trivial. 2:37pm

Looking forward to the day when Adium supports audio & video. I'll be doing more video chat and don't like to have to fire up iChat. 2:47am

Looking at a map, I now understand why my new coworker from Houghton, MI is moving to Eveleth, MN instead of Saint Paul. 2:38am

Wednesday, May 14th

Planning to crash a meeting today. You'd think that I would have acquired better meeting aversion skills. 3:43pm

We're still not finished building the interface or the features that we have planned. Bear with us, this is a Prenatal Release, afterall.