Gravatar has been acquired by wordpress parent company Automatic. This was a very cool pickup for them imo. I really liked gravatar and wanted to use them back in the day but they had some serious issues with uptime so I kind of gave up after a while.
Cool news.
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Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2416 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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Have never used gravatar, but if they merged with wordpress, it’s good!
That’s great news!
I have checked gravatar before but haven’t used one.
Thanks.
Should be a lot of fun to have avatars, sort of like posting in forums.
3x’s as fast and premium is now free. sounds like they are doing it right.
Nice purchase. Expect a “Turn Gravatars ON” in Wordpress control panel very soon.
I can easily see this taking off for wordpress.com but I’m less sure about in the wordpress.org codebase.
MyBlogLog does something very similar and although they’re relatively new I suspect they have a larger slice of the market than gravatar. It’s going to be a battle for dominance between Yahoo! and Automattic, I’m not entirely sure who to back.
Jeremy, you didnt answer the last 100 questions post you made. It was before you went on vacation…. Do we get to see those questions answered? Thx!
Oh this is excellent news. I have created a gravatar to be the same avatar as my MyBlogLog one so whenever I surf through blogs with either one of these my avatar comes up the same. But of course I dont think many people used Gravatar.
Presumably we’re going to be seeing these avatars embedded into Wordpress functionality in the near future. That would indeed be cool.
Wordpress is definately going to benefit from this.
Just digged this news – http://digg.com/tech_deals/Automattic_Acquires_Gravatar
and the best thing of this deal is Avatar serving is now more than three times as fast, and works every time.
Yeah I plan to sue them on an upcoming blog myself.
As mentioned earlier I don’t see this affecting the wordpress.org users much. But couldhave big implications for wordrpess.com users.
I use a plug in in my blog called myavatars, it looks for mybloglog avatar and if it doesn’t find it then looks for a gravatar.
First I used a gravatar plug ins with caching, but gravatar didn’t work well, as recently as last week! It’s a good news that someone serious is taking care of this thing now! I’ll keep my plug ins myavatar in the meantime because I did open an account on mybloglog, so I’m not going to spend much more time switching between one and the other!
Never heard of them, guess I will be seeing them soon though.
Ive seen other people use them but never really got round to using them myself.
Like Jonathan said, its going to be a head on between Automattic and Yahoo – I have a faint feeling Automattic is going to be backed by Google here. Google has increasingly been patronised by Automattic and Wordpress.org these days.
It remains to be seen who emerges the winner.
hopefully they won’t keep developing only for the wp platform, leaving behind everybody else…
default gravatar integration in WP 2.5, I wouldnt mind that.
I guess this will make free WP sites more interesting. I don’t do much with free WP anymore though.
Hopefully now this will improve the serving of the avatars from Gravatar.
yes it is good. Puts a more personal spin and a community site to your blog.
They had caching problems in the past and were often down.
That’s a good move on behalf of WordPress. I can see Gravatars being a default option in WP soon.
Great move for WP – great default option I agree!
That’s great news!
Very cool feature..
Talk about improving services, the link of mentioned blogpost at gravatar, I never seen it. Its returning 404. Seems they deleted the blog post so soon.
Thanks for sharing this, it actually looks really cool!
This is gonna make WP even much more appealing those pretty lame other sites.
Right now one of the sweetest things that could happen to any company that wants to see its base of users explode is getting picked up by the Wordpress folks. The Gravator folks might not have hit a financial home run but they brand will rock out now.
what if one day there are no new posts? can we click anyway?
Another added feature at wordpress, they keep coming with quite interesting things.
This is a great idea for branding and promoting your own site, but how many blogs are really Gravatar-enabled? Case in point being the blog I’m at right now….