Personal avatars and OpenID

Brian Ellin writes how well personal avatars and OpenID work together.

I myself don´t see avatars as anything especially exciting (if it´s too loud I´m too old?), but I realize many others may.

However, I disagree this is the way to execute it. We don´t need another protocol. Extra meta-data that rides shotgun on a protocol should be defined via extensions to that protocol, if possible. And OpenID has such, currently in the attribute extensions work to supplant the old fixes sreg exchanges.

Comments

[Brian Ellin]

I agree with you that another protocol is not a good thing, but I don't think the application here quite fits user-mediated attribute exchange. The way I see it, a personal avatar relates to an OpenID in the same way that a favicon relates to a website. It's a world readable graphical representation of a resource. The resource in this case, potentially, being an OpenID.

Favicons are used in many different ways to identify a website: in the browser location bar, in some search engine's results, in feed readers, and so on. Going forward, personal avatars may be used in the same way to represent OpenID users in all kinds of apps that don't yet exist.

Of course there are cases where attribute-exchange based avatar transfer is desirable, I just see the two as different beasts.

[Dmitry Shechtman]

Hans, allow me to disagree with your disagreeing.

Avatars are the oxygen of social networks, and social networks are the wind that blows into the sails of OpenID.

Pavatars ride shotgun on HTML, not on OpenID, so they actually require no special attention from the OpenID geeks. However, they do require it from the OpenID marketing folks.

I personally believe pavatars are going to be a killer app. I already started working on a pavatar consumer for phpBB.