With more and more developers building services on top of Twitter, more and more are also using Twitter’s avatars as the primary icons for their services. That’s great because for the user it means one less image to upload to yet another service. The problem with this is that if a user changes that avatar on Twitter, it could break it on the new service without you realizing it. So former Digg lead architect and current SimpleGeo (formerly known as Crash Corp). co-founder Joe Stump has created a simple service to get around that problem.
Called Tweetimag.es, basically the service allows developers to replace their calls to Amazon’s S3-hosted Twitter images and instead use a shorter img.tweetimag.es URL that will always pull your most recent Twitter avatar. So something like this:
http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/396076570/Screen_shot_2009-09-03_at_2.04.12_AM.png
Can be replaced by this:
http://img.tweetimag.es/i/parislemon_o
As you can plainly see, the tweetimag.es URL is much preferred. And you can easily get different sized thumbnails simply by replacing the “_o” with “_m” for a 24×24 pixel avatar, “_n” for a 48×48 one, “_b” for a 73×73 one.
Stump envisions that developers may want to use Twitter usernames in a way similar to how email address are used for Gravatar images. With his solution, this will be possible.
