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.

  @alexdc

Saturday, May 17th

@silkcharm Those two are integrating Web 2.0 features ... Imho, they're more like Web 1.5 ;) 2:26am

@silkcharm Web 2.0 is a feature/social thing since most websites are still Web 1.0 2:08am

Friday, May 16th

@cschick Check out banner on Where 2.0 site http://tinyurl.com/2sbpl4 it conveys interesting mechstream info-data http://tinyurl.com/6qmx3f 11:44pm

TGIF, man! It's been a crazy week. I haven't tweeted much as I've been offline alot dealing w/ stuff. And hello to new Twitter pals :) 11:40pm

If you haven't seen this yet, here's a link to the Borders 40% discount coupon (via @centernetworks ) http://tinyurl.com/6y2arq 4:45pm

@jowyang Have you considered offering a comments feed for your blog? http://tinyurl.com/5vzth4 2:46am

@robinbloor Play all you want! All I'm saying is tweets arrive chronologically in all timelines, whether on Twitter, SMS or 3rd party apps. 1:06am

Thursday, May 15th

@JonnyBentwood Do you have an OPML for your top-100 analyst blogroll? Thanks for listing them. http://tinyurl.com/22bzyp 11:20pm

@johnfleming @mkhall @sass The Taj Mahal on 78th + Biscayne. Good food but suffering a major food coma now. Time for a Cuban coffee methinks 9:33pm

Lunch at an Indian hole-in-the-wall by a Miami canal. Bollywood, Kingfisher, naan, chicken vindaloo and matar paneer ... Memories of London. 6:22pm

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