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.

  @cote

Friday, May 16th

With some serious site re-design and consolidation into 2-3 category buckets, http://www.techtarget.com/ could be pretty damn good. 8:22pm

@ibmpulse god job getting all 2.0 for Pulse. You page (http://tinyurl.com/6pp22c) of stuff is impressive! 8:09pm

Going to pre-load BrightKite with some Tivoli Pulse places in Orlando for next week and see if that does anything. Not sold on it yet. 7:40pm

@IanSkerrett just speculating ;) 4:29pm

@dan_mcweeney that looks exciting. Adobe needs to draw up some "modernization"/"Flexification" programs around stuff like that. 4:28pm

@monkchips you gonna write-up that Adobe/SpringSource post? I almost did myself yesterday but recalled you had it tagged ;) 4:24pm

@dan_mcweeney I'd just use Spring. They've already done all of that, for the most part. 4:18pm

@jhurwitz Pulse+Impact=Impulse. Funny. See ya there ;) 4:17pm

@LotusEvangelist that's a popular pot-shot, it turns out ;) 4:04pm

Anyone else going to be at Tivoli Pulse next week in Orlando? 3:47pm

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