

Chute (YC W12) Unveils Avatars.io, Hosted Avatars for Apps and Web - erin_bury
http://betakit.com/2012/07/31/chute-unveils-avatars-io-hosted-avatars-for-apps-and-web

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gregarious
As part of this release, we added a number of features requested from
developers:

* SSL Support for all avatars

* Auth-search method for avatars across multiple services (/auto)

* Pure Javascript Avatar Picker for Web Apps

Details can be found here:

<http://avatars.io>

<https://github.com/chute/avatars-io>

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mrchess
I'm curious to see how this will monetize. The founders of Gravatar often
shared anecdotes in meetups how Gravatar was painful despite being big as
there was no money in avatars.

~~~
gregarious
Monetizing is always a challenge for any service.

We definitely take to heart much of the advice the Gravatar folks have passed
along. It's not as simple as it might seem from the surface. Managing
connections to social services adds an even broader set of challenges.

That said, we do operate a media platform at heart which we are more focused
on monetizing.

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brackin
Why just Avatars.io, why not profiles.io? I'd love for my Twitter profile,
Facebook bio, About.me, etc to be in sync.

~~~
gregarious
That's an interesting, though a little beyond the core of what we do.

Sounds like a good opportunity to build something though.

~~~
brackin
Yeah that's true. I definitely think someone should build it.

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hyuuu
has been done many times and the last great attempt was shutdown by facebook,
I think they were scraping fb or something... cant remember the name

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landhar
I was somewhat surprised that they were able to get my profile picture from
facebook, as all my settings on facebook were set to be very restrictive (at
least last time I checked).

~~~
gregarious
We definitely don't employ any tricks here. Facebook will return some data
based on a username and we're able to use that public info to resolve the
username.

Of course, Facebook seems to ease their privacy settings to the more lax
version over time.

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dannyr
Any demo?

I want to see what the UX is like before integrating it into my app.

~~~
gregarious
The JS file doesn't expose a UI at the moment, it provides a method for
directly uploading to us.

On the mobile side, we have screenshots at the specific repos. Here's how the
mobile implementations look:

[ios] <https://github.com/chute/avatars-io-ios/>

[android] <https://github.com/chute/avatars-io-android>

