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.

  @mario

Saturday, May 17th

this makes me want to buy a threadmill just to see what our cats would do with it: http://tinyurl.com/ypdx2q 12:20am

@ResPres you should be chanting "Sontar Ha! Sontar Ha! Sontar Ha!" 12:14am

loving Warren Ellis' look (the musician, not @warrenellis) - not that I have ever seen @warrenellis in person, so no offense intended... 12:05am

@ScottAllen that's right, the only people I ever block are those that repeatedly follow/unfollow me, so generating multiple emails 8:54pm

@ScottAllen I'm so with you on this, I think it's a made-up problem. Why would I care who follows me, if I don't have to follow them back? 8:48pm

@lizwebpage it is where I am :) 8:02pm

@Overshard dm me your email and I'll send you one 7:59pm

@britt haven't tried VMWare.. VirtualBox currently works better than Parallels with Ubuntu 8.04 (full screen), except for the sound issue 7:35pm

trying VirtualBox - seems nice, but no sound yet (on OS X), and can't get Guest Additions to work on OpenSolaris (fine on Ubuntu 8.04) 7:18pm

@neo2049 I use m.slandr.net on my N80. Not comparable to the iphone stuff, but has more features than m.twitter.com (mainly replies) 7:13pm

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