Additional (sub-) object-type for identifying profile photos / avatars?

[Rob Dolin]

Hey all,

     I’ve been wondering about what I think may be an interesting use case:

 

·         How could a consumer of an Activity Stream feed know if a photo/image was intended to be a new representation of the user?

 

Effectively, how could we represent the notion that “John Smith updated his profile picture” or “Jane Doe changed her avatar” as separate from “John Smith posted a picture”

 

 

One idea I had was to leverage the idea from the spec that <activity:object> elements can have multiple <activity:object-type> elements and that these could be more specific and more general.  For example,

 

The "weblog entry" Object type is a specialization of the "article" Object type, so publishers SHOULD also include the Object type URL for the "article" Object type when publishing Object entries of this type. (3.2.2)

 

 

Thus, maybe we could add a http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/image-self or http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/image-avatar ?

 

Thoughts / suggestions / feedback ?

 

 

Thanks much—

--Rob

[Rob Dolin]

Hey all,

    I haven’t seen any feedback one way or another on the “image-self” or “image-avatar” object-type.  In this case, does lack of response mean consensus or disapproval?  Thanks—

--Rob

[Martin Atkins]

Rob Dolin wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I haven’t seen any feedback one way or another on the “image-self”
> or “image-avatar” object-type. In this case, does lack of response mean
> consensus or disapproval? Thanks—
>

Sorry. I missed this the first time around.

So I guess you're intending to model "Martin changed his Avatar" as a
post activity with an object of type "avatar"?

I guess this works. It does seem a little strange, since intuitively
you'd write that sentence as "Martin posted an avatar", but I can't
really think of anything better right now, unless we figure out a
solution for modelling user profile changes and consider the avatar to
be a property of a user profile.

[Scott Seely]

This one is kind of interesting. This would be an interesting
intersection between OpenSocial/PortableContacts and ActivityStreams,
where we would probably want a more general piece of info. In
OpenSocial, this would be an update to the person (a RESTful URI like
http://opensocial.myspace.com/roa/09/people/6221) where we would specify
the field updated (thumbnailUrl ~= avatar). A person could change their
nickname, interests, heroes, etc.

Isn't this really an edit to a field or collection of fields on an
object?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: activity...@googlegroups.com [mailto:activity-
> str...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Martin Atkins
> Sent: Friday, June 26, 2009 3:45 PM
> To: activity...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: Re: Additional (sub-) object-type for identifying profile
photos /
> avatars?
>
>

> Rob Dolin wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >
> > I haven't seen any feedback one way or another on the
"image-self"
> > or "image-avatar" object-type. In this case, does lack of response
mean

> > consensus or disapproval? Thanks-

[Chris Messina]

I think the case of changing a profile photo is significant enough to investigate further Rob's original proposal. I'd prefer that what we call it align with Portable Contacts of course, but that's just details.

A subtype of a photo or other media type makes some sense... and I wouldn't restrict the "is me" attribute to photos alone, though that's what we largely see on the web today.

There are also 3D avatars, Second Life avatars, video-based avatars (see robo.to), etc that should all be able to use this attribute.

I think the phrase "changed his profile photo" is a good one worth modeling — so thanks for bringing it up Rob!

Chris

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

Personal site: http://factoryjoe.com
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