Avatar photos

[John Panzer]

It looks like Cliqset is using rel="avatar" plus atommedia within actors to indicate avatar images:

<link xmlns:media="http://purl.org/syndication/atommedia"
type="image/png" rel="avatar"
href="http://dynamic.cliqset.com/avatar/jeff?s=80" media:height="80"
media:width="80"></link>
     <link xmlns:media="http://purl.org/syndication/atommedia"
type="image/png" rel="avatar"
href="http://dynamic.cliqset.com/avatar/jeff?s=120" media:height="120"
media:width="120"></link>
     <link xmlns:media="http://purl.org/syndication/atommedia"
type="image/png" rel="avatar"
href="http://dynamic.cliqset.com/avatar/jeff?s=200" media:height="200"
media:width="200"></link>

(1) Any objection to standardizing on using this for avatar images?  [1]

(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.

--
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[1] What's the current state of rel values -- must they be URIs?

[Beau Lebens]

> It looks like Cliqset is using rel="avatar" plus atommedia within actors to
> indicate avatar images:

> (1) Any objection to standardizing on using this for avatar images?  [1]

Looks like this is already the case for Person objects:
http://martin.atkins.me.uk/specs/activitystreams/activityschema#anchor14

[Monica Keller]

MySpace is the same "avatar" I don't mind it but Chris had some issues with it when we chatted at IIW

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[Chris Messina]

The previous discussion is here:

http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/browse_thread/thread/66b1d67bf558dfd2/

Rob wrote up an initial page for this on the wiki:

https://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Profile-photo

If we can get Cliqset to make this change, and then propagate this change to MySpace and elsewhere, I think that will go a long way to closing this discussion once and for all...!

I'd also move to add a "profile photo" object-type to the schema for 1.0.

Chris

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[Martin Atkins]

Chris Messina wrote:
> The previous discussion is here:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/browse_thread/thread/66b1d67bf558dfd2/
>
> Rob wrote up an initial page for this on the wiki:
>
> https://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Profile-photo
>
> If we can get Cliqset to make this change, and then propagate this
> change to MySpace and elsewhere, I think that will go a long way to
> closing this discussion once and for all...!
>
> I'd also move to add a "profile photo" object-type to the schema for 1.0.
>

I neglected to chime in on the previous discussion of this, but since
many folks don't use actual photos of themselves -- or even depictions
of themselves of any kind -- when choosing an image to represent them,
"photo" seems wrong and "avatar" is suitably generic.

link rel="photo" or rel="profile-photo" seem to be over-promising about
what you're going to get in here.

(Facebook is an exception since folks there do actually tend to upload
pictures of themselves, but see for example LiveJournal where users
generally use pictures of their favorite celebrities, or abstract art,
or doodles as their avatars.)

I'm neutral on the addition of "avatar" as a top-level object type, but
I'm happy to include it if folks think it's interesting.

[Beau Lebens]

> I neglected to chime in on the previous discussion of this, but since many
> folks don't use actual photos of themselves -- or even depictions of
> themselves of any kind -- when choosing an image to represent them, "photo"
> seems wrong and "avatar" is suitably generic.

Coming from the world of Gravatar, I also meant to say something about
this. If there's specific aversion against "avatar" for some reason,
then perhaps "profile-pic" or "picture" might be more appropriate, but
"photo" does seem incorrectly specific.

[Chris Messina]

It's kind of silly for us to be debating the definition of "photo" or "photograph".

In vcard, the "photo" attribute means: "an image or photograph information that annotates some aspect of the object the vCard represents."

Portable Contacts has the photo field as well "http://portablecontacts.net/ns/1.0/photo":

URL of a photo of this contact. The value SHOULD be a canonicalized URL, and MUST point to an actual image file (e.g. a GIF, JPEG, or PNG image file) rather than to a web page containing an image. Service Providers MAY return the same image at different sizes, though it is recognized that no standard for describing images of various sizes currently exists. Note that this field SHOULD NOT be used to send down arbitrary photos taken by this user, but specifically profile photos of the contact suitable for display when describing the contact.

While it's certainly true that many people use random photos as their profile photos, that doesn't negate the utility of this field in practice — which is more to provide a graphical depiction of a user in place of a text-only representation. Nothing about a profile photo mandates that it MUST be a photograph of the account owner (which is of course nearly impossible when the account belongs to a corporation or brand).

If we WERE to compromise, I wouldn't mind using Twitter's "profile-image":

http://twitterapi.pbworks.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method:-account%C2%A0update_profile_image

But I would prefer not to use "avatar" (despite the legacy of "Gravatar") simply because avatar has its own baggage in the 3D graphics and gaming community (where "avatar" means a dimensional representation of someone — as in the movie Avatar!).

So, let's use either:

• rel-photo or
• rel-profile-image

Let's see some +1's, document the result and be done with this question once and for all! ;)

Chris

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[John Panzer]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com> wrote:

The previous discussion is here:

http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/browse_thread/thread/66b1d67bf558dfd2/

Rob wrote up an initial page for this on the wiki:

https://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Profile-photo

If we can get Cliqset to make this change, and then propagate this change to MySpace and elsewhere, I think that will go a long way to closing this discussion once and for all...!

 

+1 (note that the Wiki page above does not yet capture all of the discussion from the thread, so please read both)

[Beau Lebens]

> It's kind of silly for us to be debating the definition of "photo" or
> "photograph".
> In vcard, the "photo" attribute means: "an image or photograph information
> that annotates some aspect of the object the vCard represents."
> Portable Contacts has the photo field as well
> "http://portablecontacts.net/ns/1.0/photo":

True,

I'm +1 on rel-photo then.

[Martin Atkins]

Chris Messina wrote:
> It's kind of silly for us to be debating the definition of "photo" or
> "photograph".

I agree that in isolation such debate is not useful.

However, given that we're talking about changing the existing spec and
existing implementations of it we need to decide whether the new term is
better enough to be worth the change.

(This is why we went with the object type "photo" rather than "image",
despite the latter being more general: "photo" had already been
implemented, and it didn't matter that much.)

I'm not convinced that "photo" is better enough to ask Cliqset and
MySpace, as well as anyone who's already consuming feeds from those
publishers and any other implementing parties I'm not familiar with to
go through the pain of changing their implementations.

In fact. I think "avatar" describes this thing much better than "photo",
since this is not defined as being a picture *of* the object but rather
a picture that *represents* the object.

[howard]

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

[John Panzer]

I agree with Howard.  (Blogger comments actually use historically accurate avatar photos associated with comments, for example.)

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 say

link rel="photo" media:canonical="true" href="http://example.org/img/1.40.40.jpg" media:width=40 media:height=40

So 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.

[Kevin Marks]

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?

 

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 say

link rel="photo" media:canonical="true" href="http://example.org/img/1.40.40.jpg" media:width=40 media:height=40

So 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.

This is where atom's lack of multiple rel values really lets us down, as rel="photo canonical" would make more sense.

[howard]

While the discussion continues about how best to "indicate whether a

particular image is an immutable snapshot of the actor's avatar as of

the timestamp of the entry", as John so nicely put it, shall I add the
issue and screenshots of the sightings to the wiki?

If so, would this be the appropriate page:
https://wiki.activitystrea.ms/Profile-photo ? ... creating a new
heading such as "Historically accurate profile-photos" ?

Or is it premature?

John, would it be useful for you to sketch out here the architecture
of how Blogger does this in comments?

(Note: I'm not a developer and therefore cannot meaningfully
contribute to the technical debate on implementation strategies.)

On Mar 26, 6:42 pm, 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