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Automattic Acquires Gravatar And Promises New Features
Written By Mike on Oct. 18, 2007.
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This is very exciting news for all you Gravatar (or former Gravatar) users out there who were wondering when your beloved (or former beloved) service was going to come back up. Fortunately, the folks at Automattic have acquired Gravatar and pledge to put lots of development hours behind a refresh to make it more scalable and easier to use.
I wonder if this will be the catalyst needed to get people back using the service again. For a long time the servers were dying and they built some ill will amongst blogging folk when their pages would barely load. I'm positive that Matt and his team can do wonders for Gravatar from a programming perspective, but the reliability perspective will need more attention.
Oli
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
Gravatar has been up for a while, hasn't it?
BinaryMoon
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I thought gravatar had died a death. I always liked the idea of the service but the rubbish performance put me off implementing it. I'm very interested to see what they do with this.
jchristopher
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I think this is a great move, I never really implemented Gravatar much because it always seemed to be slow or completely down. I think we can all expect major performance upgrades, and I bet we'll see another influx of use.
RightOn
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I can definitely see an influx in its use as WordPress.com is run by Automattic.
All they have to do is plug it in and BOOM, all wordpress.com blogs have immediate access to it via their dashboard.
BinaryMoon
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
They already have an avatar system on wordpress.com, and they say they're going to migrate it over to the new system.
This will be great for a standardised avatar system. Maybe I will finally add gravatars to my site...
ErinR
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I think this is great. I like the idea behind gavatars, but as everyone's saying, it had too many performance issues. This is a step in the [very] right direction!
anadgouda
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I had liked idea of a Gravatar when I had first heard about it, but I think it need more application to be really valuable. Automattic is a good company to build high value out of seemingly small things. I think this will work out well.
estarla
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I've always had Gravatar integrated on my site--glad to see it'll see huge improvements. :)
Michael
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
Ha I always thought that they might do this. Sweet.
RightOn
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
The mere fact that the "premiere" features will now be free makes me think about looking into it again. Along with 128px Gravatars.
Abi
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
I thought about putting Gravatars on HeatEatReview, but when I saw complaints everywhere (and non-working systems on other blogs) I decided to go with names only.
However, with this new development I'll reconsider using the system on my site. It think it makes it easier for people leaving comments to develop conversations and relationships. Even if it is just a photo.
chapstick
Written Oct. 18, 2007 / Report /
Cool! I've been using Gravatars for awhile on my site, and never really had a problem with them. Sometimes they would be slow to load, but since they upgraded to 2.0 or whatever, it's been better.
But having Automattic run the show now only means better things for Gravatar and its users.