Ambient Avatars, Avatar Streaming, Avatar Management

James Governor just alerted me to the fact that Chinposin.com is maintaining an archive of user's Twitter avatars, if you are following chinposin there.

chinposin.com Avatar Stream, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

[from chinposin.com]

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.

So, we can start to use Twitter avatars in new ways. Secret messages. Mood indicators. Monthly seasonal changes. Out To Lunch, versus Hard At Work. Looking For Work, versus Overworked. The possibilities are endless!

I hope they add the ability to manage a gallery of avatars, and integration with Twitter so that we can toggle from one to another with the least hassle.

Comments

[james governor]

thanks for the awesome write up, Stowe. Regarding your feature requests that's where we're heading. Regarding twitter though- its really up to to them. We'd frankly LOVE to be able to update our twitter avatars from chinposin. but the API doesn't support that at this point. We want to build some more momentum for the concept, and the app, and then twitter might be open to discussions.

That said if anyone else is building a social software application and would like the ability to embed active avatars in their service we'd certainly like to hear from them. there is no reason we should only work with twitter - it just happens to be where me and chris live.

[Sam Lawrence]

Mr. T was hot.

I sorta want to see you as something Frank Miller.