Chute (YC W12) Unveils Avatars.io, Hosted Avatars for Apps and Web | Hacker News Reader

Chute (YC W12) Unveils Avatars.io, Hosted Avatars for Apps and Web

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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

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.

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.

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

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

Sounds like a good opportunity to build something though.

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

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

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).

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.

Any demo?

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

You can see an example of how it works when you add your profile pic on http://refer.ly

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

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