A few days ago we released an updated look for Gravatar.com.  We really felt that the old front page was cramped, stuffy, and heavy.  So we worked hard to lighten it up, make it more immediately informative, and gave everything a little more room to breathe.  Playing a starring role on the new front page is our introduction video (which I like to call Gravatar, the Motion Picture.) Anyhow this is just a small update from Gravatar-land.  We hope you’ll enjoy the new look while we cook up some cool stuff for you in the future.

–DK

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Now you can watch Gravatar, the motion picture! Which was put together by the ever helpful Michael Pick. If you’ve ever had trouble explaining exactly what Gravatar.com does to your friends, family, neighbors, long lost friends, and that dude down the street, then this is the screen cast for you!

404 Gravatar Not Found?!

It may not be a groundbreaking feature, but there is some a small new addition to the Gravatar API. You can now specify a default value of 404 to make the image… well… return a 404 not found error if there is no image for the given email address. This probably wont change the life of you website developers out there, but it just might make it easier for you application developers (you know… the people who have to actually compile their code before it works…)

Did You Know?

Today we have TWO “Did you know” tidbits for the price of one.

1. This little tidbit is often a surprise for developers to find out, but you can use https://secure.gravatar.com/ [...] to link to an SSL encrypted Gravatar.  This is especially useful when linking using Gravatars from SSL encrypted web pages.
2. You can pre-fill the email address in sign up form for Gravatar.com to make it a little bit easier for your users to know what to do. Just add the email address to the end of the sign up URL like so.

Sightings in the Wild

1. Where.com’s “WHERE wall” web service has been using Gravatars since the word “GO” for displaying user avatars. They had one small hiccup, but we got in contact with the developers (who were super nice and down to earth, by the way) to get the situation rectified.
2. We recently heard that doMelhor (which, I’m told, is the leading Portuguese digg clone) recently enabled Gravatar support for avatar display.

That’s all I have for now but, as always, there is more to come from Gravatar.com

Cheers!
DK

Jeff writes in to let us know that he has created an open source Gravatar control for Silverlight and WPF apps available here: http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2009/03/gravatar-control/

Thanks, Jeff!

Andy writes in to tell us that he has instructions for using Gravatar with Castle MonoRail projects in his blog post Integrating Gravatar with Castle MonoRail.

Thanks, Andy!

Silveira Neto write in to let us know that he has written an article covering how to use gravatar with JavaFX.  Thanks for the info, Silveira, I’m sure many people will find this to be very useful!

Michael C. writes in to let us know that TinyPic users now get their Gravatar for their profile image.  Thanks TinyPic, we think you’re pretty grrrrreat yourselves!

As a side note I think it’s really telling that a service which hosts images and videos for people to easily link to decided to use Gravatar for their profiles.  TinyPic has the infrastructure in place to do this.  They already have uploading, caching servers, and a CDN figured out.  They might even have croppers and image effects floating around.  But 2 things are important here.  The first is that profile images still aren’t the at core of what they want to provide to people.  Second, and more importantly, is that enabling Gravatar support is good for their users — It’s easy, its simple, and it gives them value far beyond that individual profile page.

Sarah C. writes in to let us know that Mindtouch Deki supports Gravatars via an extension.  Gravatars help give a sense of community, as well as a sense of ownership to all kinds of sites.  A wiki is a great place for both, as shown in their examples.  Awesome work, guys!

Thomas C. wrote in to let us know that EditGrid has gravatar support.

I’m always really excited to watch where Gravatar expands beyond the blog commenting space.  EditGrid seems to have seen the upsides of using Gravatar for profiles.  They don’t have to worry about writing and maintaining a cropper, file storage, serving infrastructure, backups, etc. All they have to worry about is their core business: making a killer web based spreadsheet application.

Some of your may have noticed that, for a while now, Gravatar.com has been sporting a fancy new method for setting your Gravatar image — Taking a photo with your webcam!  I just figured that I would drop a note in here and make a “formal” announcement about it.  Just choose the “A webcam  attached to your computer” from the “Add an image” page.  A lot of people ask where they can get images to use (since Gravatar.com does not provide any images to choose from,)  and this is a great way to get started!

Note: If you’re using a Mac with an iSight you will probably have to right click on the webcam applet, choose settings, click on the last little tab (looks like a webcam,) and choose the correct camera.  This will probably be true of any computer with multiple video sources. I would set this default for you but flash is a black-box (they protect you from malicious sites trying to play with your settings — as they should!)

So… go forth… and say cheese!

I still remember the post Matt made back when we announced that we’d acquired Gravatar.com… “Of course I should be able to have my avatar wherever I go! Of course email is a great way to key it! Of course there should be an open API for any platform!” And we meant it. We have always intended to make Gravatar.com THE avatar system for WordPress.com — It just made sense.

We flipped the switch on the evening of Friday Dec 5, 2008.  I’m happy to report that there was only minimal headache involved all around.  I’m also happy to note that the extra traffic (to the tune of something like 900 requests per second during peak usage) had a fairly negligible impact on Gravatars infrastructure.  I mention this to lay to rest any doubts that you might have about Gravatars ability to handle the extra requests that even high traffic web services might send our way.

Just as WordPress.com will continue to focus on being the best hosted blogging platform that it can be, Gravatar will focus on being the best Avatar platform that it can be. We’ll continue to grow both products, and continue to mature the integration between them. We’re also working on eventually allowing UI integration with non Automattic owned sites (but lets not get ahead of ourselves.)

I’m looking forward to announcing some more really cool stuff for both developers and users…  Some API goodness, and some UI improvements.  I’ll also continue working, as always, under the hood to make Gravatar as fast and reliable as possible.

Cheers until then!
DK