Gravatar Blog

You’ve been using Gravatar for a long time as a way to show a little bit of your identity around the web. Everywhere you dropped an email, be it a comment or the creation of an account, the owner of that website could choose to use your details to load up the picture that you’d decide to associate with that email address. Last night we rolled out the first step in bringing a whole lot more context and personality to your presence online.

You didn’t think the design update was the only change we made, did you? Every gravatar now supports the addition of full profile information against it, so that you can paint a much richer picture of who you are. You can upload a bunch of your favorite photos to your profile (they don’t have to be gravatars at all), and you can even verify your ownership of other online profiles and services. When you verify that you own something, people will be able to tell this is your account and not some imposter.

We’re continuing the tradition of complete openness that Gravatar  has been known for, so nothing you put into your profile will be locked behind proprietary APIs or a scary terms of service — what you choose to share in your profile will be open to the world.

You’ll find some cool features on the new profiles: you can have a gallery of your favorite photos, add a variety of contact methods, and link your other profiles. Every linked account is verified so you know it’s not an impostor, and we also might be able to do cool stuff in the future like aggregate your content or update your avatar in multiple places when you update Gravatar.

While we’re all getting familiar with this new system, you will only be able to view your own profile on Gravatar.com, so you’ll have a bit of time to spruce it up before we’re out of beta. Profiles will become public for everyone soon so make sure to check yours out and update it to include (or leave out) exactly what you want. If you remove all information from your profile, then other people will only be able to see your Gravatar, just like right now.

If you’re running a website that already uses gravatars, we’ll have some more information soon on how you can make the most of these new profiles!

Phil C. wrote in to let us know he’s developed a module to make Gravatars available within Phorum. Websites using Phorum software to run their forums can easily drop this Module into their installations, no customization required (although customization is easily supported). Check out the full list of features and grab the Module here. Thanks Phil!

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.