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.

  @tebbo

Friday, May 16th

@PaulMiller or read 12:04pm

@PaulMiller I just put the noisecancel on and go to sleep. 12:03pm

Tuesday, May 13th

@sleepydog. Events have overtaken me. I won't be at ccc tomorrow. I'm really sorry. Let's fix another date. 7:07pm

Any UK people know about fixed penalty notices? My (mercifully rare) speeding ticket has the wrong road on it. Does that invalidate it? 3:44pm

@monkchips - your long w00t seems to play havoc with my Twitter display. 3:39pm

Thanks to those of you who responded here and elsewhere to my minipoll on Outlook. "Mixed feelings but live with it" summarises views so far 3:39pm

Straw poll: If you use(d) Outlook, do you like/dislike/other it? Thanks. 11:05am

@tquinlan "is helping police with enquiries" - You can't just say that. 11:04am

Monday, May 12th

@sleepydog "85 years of video (a whole lifetime) will be able to be stored on any new iPhone in a few years" - and this is *good*? 7:36pm

@JonnyBentwood - I guess signal/noise is an issue for me. Sometimes too much noise (and I'm as guilty as anyone). Very social though. 9:55am

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