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.

  @dominiccampbell

Saturday, May 17th

@fuelmyblog mr @monkchips was my man. I hit twitter over a year ago before I had a blog even! 12:49am

@derekeb ha!oh no-as you can tell we're relaxed about such things in our group of friends.I even put him in a presso! http://snurl.com/298mg 12:48am

@LittleLaura ha! you go get em! :) 11:16pm

@LittleLaura not nice poor you. should get a trace on it. sounds all too deliberate. weird people in the world. 11:13pm

@LittleLaura seriously not nice. although could have been worse. trust me. 11:10pm

Hmmm interesting anonymous voicemail involving someone's random trip to the toilet in a pub. Not nice :-P 11:01pm

Simultaneously in heaven and hell having just wolfed a big lump of wasabi. Yum, yuck, ouch, mmmm delicious, argh! 7:14pm

@yellowpark waiting? for @monkchips? well I never! ;-) 6:46pm

Check me out - the only spoon suit wearer at the Catalyst Awards launch last week! http://snurl.com/296ed and http://snurl.com/296ej 6:11pm

@rachelclarke I have a ticket but am not going to make it. life has overtaken me! 6:09pm

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