Historical profile photos/avatars (Was: Re: Avatar photos)
Chris Messina
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:25 AM, John Panzer <jpa...@google.com> wrote:
I agree with Howard. (Blogger comments actually use historically accurate avatar photos associated with comments, for example.)I strongly agree with Howard on this - Portable Contacts allows multiple photos associated with the user, and the ability to have the historically accurate one makes a lot of sense - DailyBooth's transition form a pic-a-day site to a 'conversation through photos' site by user practice is a key indicator that this is a useful feature.PoCo's photos structure, like other plural fields, has the 'primary' property to indicate which one is preferred for use. Is the concept of 'canonical' sufficiently different to make it worth adding as a separate parameter?This is where atom's lack of multiple rel values really lets us down, as rel="photo canonical" would make more sense.
My original proposal on this thread needs updating. I originally said:(2) I would like to make one small addition -- some way for the feed generator to indicate whether a particular image is an immutable snapshot of the actor's avatar as of the timestamp of the entry, or whether it's a pointer to a changeable image that will always hold the latest image for that actor. Quick proposal: Add a rel="avatar-snapshot" with the same semantics as avatar except that the bits are a snapshot, and should not be assumed to be the most current avatar photo (go to the profile to look that up if you need it and it's not provided.) You can provide both.I think it'd be better to do the reverse, and have a way to explicitly indicate that a particular image URL is always going to contain the latest version from a person's profile. This could be done with another rel value but then you're repeating yourself. It could be done with an Atom Media link attribute, if we're willing to add these sorts of semantics into Atom Media.For example, introduce a media:canonical attribute, so you could saylink rel="photo" media:canonical="true" href="http://example.org/img/1.40.40.jpg" media:width=40 media:height=40So then you know that http://example.org/img/1.40.40.jpg is the 'canonical' url to use for the 40x40 version of the 'photo' of whatever you're processing, and that you can cache that URL for use in future lookups without needing to double check against (say) a profile.A 'historical' avatar tied to the activity would omit the canonical bit.
On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:48 AM, howard <howard....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello all, this is my first contribution, go easy please :)
>
> This seems like the right thread to discuss the issue and to get some
> guidelines about whether to add the issue to the wiki, and where. Even
> if the consensus turns out to be that it is too early to introduce
> issue into the discussion, I would dearly love to get some feedback
> from the list.
>
> I see a need for the spec to allow for associating the profile-photo
> (avatar) to the object-type according to the timeline, so that you
> could view archived objects with their historically accurate avatars
> at the time of the original post, if the system adopts and implements
> this piece.
>
> Sightings in the wild:
>
> The march of changing avatars wedded to their updates can actually be
> seen on Twitter, but only on the mobile site. Look at
> http://mobile.twitter.com/whitehouse with a mobile user agent. In the
> days leading up to the HCR votes on 21 March, @whitehouse changed its
> twavatar regularly and posted status updates associated with the new
> twavatar. Unlike twitter.com and most clients, the mobile site lays
> out each status updates alongside its avatar, showing multiple avatars
> for the same account in the feed. (This works until Twitter's CDN
> expires the link to the image.)
>
> Dailybooth, http://dailybooth.com/live , uses an image-centric feed
> with relatively large avatars in the feed, 233x186px. Your last posted
> image is treated as your current avatar. Status updates are frequent
> and often make specific textual reference to what's shown in the
> avatar. Random account: http://dailybooth.com/yellingjellyfish
>
> Use cases---
> -- Status updates that refer directly to the avatar:
> • How do you like my new haircut?
> • Put a green overlay on your photo to support #iranelection
> • Services that enable avatar customization and permit (or force) an
> associated status update: twibbon.com, avartize.com and twavatars.com
>
> -- Historically accurate avatars give the appropriate context to the
> status updates:
> • "Icon-memes" such as Pro twitter accounts, Verified accounts usually
> are associated to a certain time period. http://twitter.pbworks.com/Icon-Memes
> • Updates with historical significance could be presented as
> originally experienced, instead of with most recent avatar:
> http://twitter.com/jack/status/29
>
> It is reasonable to expect that as applications that interact with
> camera phones and webcams continue to develop, we will see the avatar
> being changed more often and see it containing more "pixelated
> metadata", similar to the expressions we use in face-to-face
> situations.
>
> I suppose this issue is related to the idea of pushing out avatars to
> systems so that they can update the cache as Chris mused upon in this
> thread: http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/msg/85c69e9f24f4b455
>
> -Howard
>
> --
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Chris Messina
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Kevin Marks
Forking this into its own topic...This is an interesting idea Howard, and one that would be interesting to support — something that I've thought about before and actually worked on.As you can see, a service like Gravatar does maintain a history of profile photos:Other services do this as well, like Yahoo Mash (now defunct):...and Digg:So, being able to "age" through an activity stream is extremely interesting, and something that is not currently afforded through most streams — which presume a kind of of-the-moment timelessness.The simple solution seems to amend Portable Contacts, since that's where the photos, as Kevin Marks points out, should actually come from (since we'd want to have historical photos for people-as-objects as well, rather than just actors).As additional properties to any of the plural elements in PoCo, we could simply add the "startDate" and "endDate" attributes to specify the time period when certain metadata was applicable... for example, I have many outdated email addresses for friends — and LinkedIn lets me associate myself with several corporate email addresses that I no longer own... (i.e. ch...@flock.com). Adding start and end dates to these attributes would enable this type of history preservation without disturbing existing implementations, which can just presume canonicalicality (?) if no start or end dates are specified.
howard
we're citing services.
I'm glad there is consensus on supporting this use case since I
believe that it is inevitable (and highly desirable) that authors will
be contextually relating their avatars to their ojects/updates etc. on
purpose more and more. (Disclaimer of a sort: I'm working on creating
a service that would enable and encourage this sort of thing.)
Some textual updates will not make sense without the avatar. So it is
important to preserve that intentionality in the stream.
Chris, I have a question about the startDate/endDate concept. Is it
feasible to add minutes/seconds to the time stamp to be able to handle
rapidly changing avatars like DailyBooth? Is using clock-based data
when dealing with multiple servers and multiple services a good idea?
It is less complicated to mark the avatar object with a unique
identifier associated with the object in question?
-H
On Mar 26, 7:24 pm, Kevin Marks <kevinma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AbcAS_dEul22ZGZuZzJ6cXhfNDFn...
>
> (yes, I need to make that a blogpost)
>
> iChat also has a quick-choose photo history:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinmarks/4465421190/
>
> but it is a global change too.
>
>
>
>
>
> > Chris
>
> > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Kevin Marks <kevinma...@gmail.com>wrote:
> >>> So then you know thathttp://example.org/img/1.40.40.jpgis the
> >>> 'canonical' url to use for the 40x40 version of the 'photo' of whatever
> >>> you're processing, and that you can cache that URL for use in future lookups
> >>> without needing to double check against (say) a profile.
>
> >>> A 'historical' avatar tied to the activity would omit the canonical bit.
>
> >> This is where atom's lack of multiple rel values really lets us down, as
> >> rel="photo canonical" would make more sense.
>
> >>> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 9:48 AM, howard <howard.lipt...@gmail.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>> > Hello all, this is my first contribution, go easy please :)
>
> >>> > This seems like the right thread to discuss the issue and to get some
> >>> > guidelines about whether to add the issue to the wiki, and where. Even
> >>> > if the consensus turns out to be that it is too early to introduce
> >>> > issue into the discussion, I would dearly love to get some feedback
> >>> > from the list.
>
> >>> > I see a need for the spec to allow for associating the profile-photo
> >>> > (avatar) to the object-type according to the timeline, so that you
> >>> > could view archived objects with their historically accurate avatars
> >>> > at the time of the original post, if the system adopts and implements
> >>> > this piece.
>
> >>> > Sightings in the wild:
>
> >>> > The march of changing avatars wedded to their updates can actually be
> >>> > seen on Twitter, but only on the mobile site. Look at
> >>> >http://mobile.twitter.com/whitehousewith a mobile user agent. In the
> >>> > days leading up to the HCR votes on 21 March, @whitehouse changed its
> >>> > twavatar regularly and posted status updates associated with the new
> >>> > twavatar. Unlike twitter.com and most clients, the mobile site lays
> >>> > out each status updates alongside its avatar, showing multiple avatars
> >>> > for the same account in the feed. (This works until Twitter's CDN
> >>> > expires the link to the image.)
>
> >>> > Dailybooth,http://dailybooth.com/live, uses an image-centric feed
> >> activity-strea...@googlegroups.com<activity-streams%2Bunsubscrib e...@googlegroups.com>
> >> .
> >> For more options, visit this group at
> >>http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams?hl=en.
>
> > --
> > Chris Messina
> > Open Web Advocate, Google
>
> > Personal:http://factoryjoe.com
> > Follow me on Buzz:http://buzz.google.com/chrismessina
> > ...or Twitter:http://twitter.com/chrismessina
>
> > This email is: [ ] shareable [X] ask first [ ] private
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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Chris Messina
And, of course, Facebook has a gallery reserved for profile pix since
we're citing services.
I'm glad there is consensus on supporting this use case since I
believe that it is inevitable (and highly desirable) that authors will
be contextually relating their avatars to their ojects/updates etc. on
purpose more and more. (Disclaimer of a sort: I'm working on creating
a service that would enable and encourage this sort of thing.)
Some textual updates will not make sense without the avatar. So it is
important to preserve that intentionality in the stream.
Chris, I have a question about the startDate/endDate concept. Is it
feasible to add minutes/seconds to the time stamp to be able to handle
rapidly changing avatars like DailyBooth? Is using clock-based data
when dealing with multiple servers and multiple services a good idea?
It is less complicated to mark the avatar object with a unique
identifier associated with the object in question?
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to activity-strea...@googlegroups.com.