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.

  @monkchips

Friday, May 16th

what are software developers made of? coffee and coke, and and crisps and biscuits. what are business people made of? i have no clue. 6:24pm

heading home. i have done a lot of client fulfillment work this week, which is very good news. Can't just sell and hand-wave all the time. 6:16pm

@monadic pure speculation on my part 5:09pm

great new greenmonk post from @tomraftery, getting under the skin of Nortel Cisco war over power consumed by switches http://snurl.com/295tw 4:35pm

@jowyang you were surely *born* organised. the moleskin is a symptom not a cause. you have scheduling in your bones. "3 weeks to chinpose". 4:27pm

@mjasay Spring arguably doesn't have runtime problem. Red Hat arguably does. Its all about the APIs baby. Fleury just pissed JMX didnt win? 4:24pm

@dan_mcweeney direct Spring to Flex would work just fine. don't need another intermediary layer. 4:20pm

Rod Johnson knows its all about the API. Adobe needs a stronger enterprise play. Flex rocks. Spring 0wns enterprise Java in many shops. QED. 4:14pm

@mjasay Rod Johnson is one of the smartest guys in the industry. he has begun to make pro-Flex noises. Where could they do the most damage? 4:11pm

if Adobe acquires SpringSource there will be a lot of collateral damage. Now that would be transformative. enterprise Java through Flex bang 4:08pm

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