Incarnate is a new service from MIX Online labs that you can incorporate into your blog or website that allows your users to associate themselves with an avatar they’ve already published on the web to social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and more. We provide a Word Press plug-in as well as other samples, making it easy for people to use on their sites. Behind the scenes, Incarnate is a WCF-based JSON-P REST Service hosted in Windows Azure available for anyone to use.
Good for the visitor
Have you ever been to a website and wanted to leave a comment only to have the website ask you to upload an avatar? An avatar that you’ve already uploaded countless times to countless sites like Twitter or Facebook? Incarnate solves this problem by allowing users to easily find those avatars and use them when leaving a comment. No more browsing your hard drive for that image. No more sites with only default avatars.
Good for the web-publisher
Using avatars inspires confidence in the site. If users see that others on the site are not “anonymous,” user-testing shows the content is taken more seriously. Incarnate is also very simple to set-up. We support sites running on .NET and have created an easy-to-install WordPress plugin for the millions of users on that platform.
Incarnate is easy
Incarnate is easy to use and style to fit your site, and we provide instructions on how to do so on the site, as well as other information regarding the Incarnate Service. The Incarnate service is a REST based service which finds avatars on the web. The service takes a username as input and returns the URL to the images of avatars that match that username hosted by different providers. By default, the Incarnate service can query the following providers: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Xbox Live and YouTube. An instance of the Incarnate service is available for use anonymously and for free at http://incarnate.visitmix.com.
