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.

  @vdichev

Thursday, May 15th

Wasted my Internet hour yesterday to read a single blog entry- presentation transcript. Uh, Steve Yegge writes a lot: http://snurl.com/28xrp 10:34am

Tuesday, May 13th

Already in a vacation routine, wake up at 6:30 (mental, I know), reading/swimming on the beach, lunch, short nap, 15:30-16:30 Internet time. 2:29pm

Monday, May 12th

Finally hooked onto the hotel wireless catching up on mail and Twitter while waiting for my wife to get enough of being massaged in the spa. 3:32pm

Saturday, May 10th

At the airport, browsing a pdf book, the sound of Mando Diao and Army of Anyone in my ears. Starting to get over the separation with my son. 11:39am

I've never seen anything cuter than tiny baby feet. Left them along with their owner at his granny, now going to airport. Already miss them. 9:01am

If the point of changing a diaper is that the baby bottom has less poop than your hands and clothes, then consider the mission accomplished. 8:54am

Friday, May 9th

Set clever autoreply: check. Met my tweet quota for the next week: check. Mentioned the word "vacation" in half of my today's tweets: check. 3:07pm

Why are interesting projects always happening to others? I've reached a tipping point. I'll do my own. And I get to choose the web framework 2:54pm

Note to self: don't plan on doing anything productive when working from home with a 6-month old and a mother-in-law set to clean everything. 2:47pm

@yojibee If you don't plan something, it happens much easier. You know where to find me, you've been to the kicker room. Or just ask @oliver 2:21pm

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