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.

  @johnniemoore

Friday, May 16th

homeward bound 5:59pm

not plucking up the courage to ask fellow passenger for a chip 1:40pm

Leapt aboard this train and now hoping it's the fastest to get to Paddington 1:28pm

@samismail ah, mothers! 10:39am

Pink's explanation that Bush won in 2000 due to bad design of ballot is brilliant storytelling 10:30am

Reading A Whole New Mind. Some good stuff but also many of the familiar tropes of best selling business books 9:46am

At Paddington en route to Slough. Where Thunderbirds was made, I learnt last night 9:43am

Ok, Friday, a quiet word please. I had serious issues with your friend Thursday. I hope you and I can find a way to do better than that. 8:17am

Thursday, May 15th

boy, this has been a dispiriting day. looking forward to bed. 9:16pm

Retweeting @timjeby: Retweeting @Zadi: Bill O'Reilly's flip out makes an awesome dance mix: http://tinyurl.com/5ljad4 5:27pm

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