Often, the most successful social media ventures discover a way to connect personally with the user. It can be something useful, or a colossal waste of time. As much as we like to be efficient all day, we’re only somewhat efficient. The rest of the day we’re just wasting our time. And I can’t recommend a better way to waste your time than to take a minute every day to take your Daily Mugshot. The Daily Mugshot is a fun free service where you take a photo of yourself once a day, and over time those photos are collected to create an animated movie of yourself. You’ve seen stuff like this before where a person takes a photo of him or herself every day for a year or more and then makes a movie of it. It seems really difficult and time consuming to do, and it was, until Daily Mugshot simplified it.
Here’s my Daily Mugshot
Daily Mugshot is a free Web application for creating a photo a day movie of yourself. All you need is a Web cam. Once you sign up, you go to the site and take a picture of yourself. The trick to a really successful animated movie is to lock your eyes in the same place every day. Daily Mugshot helps you do that. When you take your first photo (make sure it’s in a place you want to be every day) it gives you two icons for you to place right over your pupils. Then, every day you come back to take your photo, just make sure you line up your eyes with the two icons. It’s definitely worth it. If you don’t line up your eyes, your move will look like crap. Here’s a sample of someone who did line up their eyes. And here’s a sample of someone who didn’t. See the difference? You need to lock your eyes in the same place so that the viewer can focus on one location as the animation happens. If you completely change positions, then there’s no focus, and therefore no animation.
After you take your 64th photo, you can create a 3.5″ x 2″ flipbook for only $9. It’s one of the ways Daily Mugshot can actually make some money. I’m halfway there, and when I get there I will definitely be ordering one, or many, for my family.
This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/19/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.
