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.

  @thomas_jung

Friday, May 16th

Shocked by the amount of spoon feeding expected on the SDN Forums. People are trying to do Web Dynpro ABAP who have no concepts of basics 5:56pm

Updating the MDM server on my laptop in preparation for my visit to @ewh - I've got all kinds of top secret stuff to show off :) 5:36pm

@dan_mcweeney surprisingly I couldn't find anything. Seems like a good candidate - maybe the info isn't as open as the MS Gamertag? 3:54pm

@rhirsch - although I'm not actually playing this morning - must just be background downloads or my kids watching HD-DVDs 3:46pm

@rhirsch Very cool. I already use something similar to post Xbox activity to Twitter - hence the playing www.xbox.com() 3:45pm

playing www.xbox.com () 2:03pm

I've been spending a lot of time in the WDA SDN Forums lately - nice to get back to the forums after a long break 1:25pm

Thursday, May 15th

playing www.xbox.com () 4:33pm

Playing with Flash Player 10 - it gives my Nvidia 8800 GTX video card something to do when I'm not playing games. :) 2:52pm

playing www.xbox.com () 9:34am

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