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.

  @pmuellr

Saturday, May 17th

My Ubuntu VMware image is so old it still has FF 2.0 running on it; thank goodness. 1:42am

cleaning out trailing EOF chars out of some 17yr old C code. What in gods' names were we thinking? 1:38am

Friday, May 16th

I think this is the first link I've seen to Band XI, some old OTI buddies; re: their Fit tools for Eclipse: http://is.gd/hHX 11:55pm

Man, I love chit-chatting with super-smart people. 8:07pm

Having the default action for .py files on the Mac be "build me an .app from it" is pretty fracking annoying; how'd I manage to do that? 5:55pm

@IanSkerrett Life is more interesting with trolls in it, than not. Enjoy. 3:01pm

deploying evil plans 2:56pm

@schisamo You're the only person I've ever heard of leaving IBM and having to switch FROM Ruby TO Java. Best of luck, dude! 1:27pm

Why does the PS3 intertubes browser have a pre-installed bookmark for Twitter, when the update button doesn't work on it? FAIL 4:02am

"McCain Sees U.S. Troops Leaving Iraq by 2013" -- Oh my. Does John McCain think it's 1913 or sumptin'? http://is.gd/hfO 3:00am

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