Startup Idea #69: OpenID for avatar

I always supported the idea of portability. There is little sense in forcing users to key in their information in every single web service they signed on. However, customising your avatar is even more painful. Hence, an idea I am toying with is the concept of OpenAvatar (See OpenID).

While the current favour is on avatar portability, my personal view is that this approach is too hard to be achieved. My thinking is to have an open standard where the characteristics, not the actual avatar, will be portable. These characteristics can be seen as 'meta-tags' that describes the avatar and can include examples such as gender, skin colour, clothing colour, et al. With these portable meta-tags, each game can provide their users with similar looking avatar, despite different game engines.

With these meta tags, we can actually create a lot of cool services. How about a De.cli.ous version where users can search through different avatars through tags (assuming the OpenAvatar engine have the ability to take pictures of different avatars)? We can also allow users to add tags that instantly alters their avatars across different games. Finally, these meta tags can be mergered with OpenID which will then provide even more convenience to the users.

Regardless of whether my idea works or not, portability is going to be very important. There should be more experiments trying different approaches to achieve this. Let's hope it happens.

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