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.

  @jonno

Friday, May 16th

night all from this side of the pond - good weekends! 10:07pm

@idarose absolutely. Incidentally, talked to Jonathan Huberman at Iomega this week, pushing my "fireproof hard disk enclosure" idea again ;) 9:57pm

@lludovic I'll probably have signed up to Plaxo again by this time next week! Or maybe not - who knows ;) 9:45pm

@idarose I'm sure there's plenty more to it than we see as prosumers! 9:44pm

@idarose we get to play in that space from time to time - I think it every analyst's "hobby farm" ;) Connected home means I am tech support! 9:40pm

@idarose indeed! awww, how do you get to be a "connected home" analyst ... sounds like a lotta fun :) 9:35pm

Worked out Plaxo gripe. "Plaxo will not sell, exchange, or otherwise share Your Information with third parties." Sell Plaxo, sell my info. 6:50pm

@emcworld see you next week 6:42pm

@gartenberg @idarose by the time things get over here we don't get much say in whether its right or not :) 6:18pm

@gartenberg @idarose we do more "insight" than "validation", a factor of being outside US where most validation takes place 6:17pm

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