Incarnate is a REST-based service that uses peoples’ usernames to find their avatars on the web. It supports JSON with Padding (JSON-P) so it can be called from any domain. It was written in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) using the REST Starter Kit in combination with the JSON-P encoder that ships as an extensibility sample with the WCF samples.
*NOTE: This code gallery project contains only the server code to run Incarnate. If you are looking for the WordPress plugin or the HTML and Javascript client samples, go to
http://visitmix.com/labs/incarnate.
We have deployed an instance of Incarnate to Windows Azure, so it scales well. This instance is hosted at
http://incarnate.visitmix.com. You also have the option of deploying your own instance of Incarnate to your own server. You can download the source code to the Incarnate service here. You’ll see that the Incarnate infrastructure supports a provider model, so that new providers can be easily added, as long as they conform to the very simple IProvider interface. So, for example, if someone wanted to make a Flickr provider (which is a site that has publicly accessible avatars), they could do so. (And if you do write a new avatar provider, let us know so we can deploy it to our instance of Incarnate). Additional documentation about writing a provider is available in the source code to the Incarnate service itself.
For more about Incarnate, see
http://visitmix.com/labs/incarnate