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.

  @jamesurquhart

Thursday, May 15th

@dwmcallister Thanks, dude! 7:47pm

@craigbalding Thanks, dude. Yeah, big change, but I wanted to get farther from infrastructure and more to apps again, so its all good. 7:45pm

@botchagalupe :-) I never get mad at you, John, I just think you're nuts sometimes. Seriously, we'll still be exchanging posts, I'm sure. 7:44pm

@lancew Yes, Alfresco's UK based, and yes I will be there sometime in the next few months. I'll definitely need a pint with an old friend. 7:43pm

About to tell last client about changing jobs from Cassatt to Alfresco. After this, I will write the blog post announcing the change. 6:22pm

Wednesday, May 14th

Anyway, bittersweet feelings, as I still believe strongly in the Cassatt vision and opportunity. 10:40pm

I will still blog on cloud computing (in fact, will probably change the name of my SLAuto blog), and will add an ECM blog. 10:39pm

I'll blog in detail tonight or tomorrow, but I'm joining Alfresco, which means I get to work on cool open source tech mostly from home 10:38pm

Lest anyone think I am down on Cassatt, my reasons for changing jobs have to do with lifestyle, not issues with company or technology. 10:37pm

Announcing big news to my customers today: I am moving on from Cassatt. Last day is Friday. 10:36pm

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