The best ideas are often the simplest. (At least in hindsight.) The idea of globally-recognized avatar, or Gravatar, struck me from the first time I heard it. 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!
Watching how Gravatar changed and evolved over the years I saw a service with great adoption and potential, but facing some classic problems of scale that successful sites are often lucky to run into. Scaling happens to be something my company, Automattic, is very good at, and as we started chatting with Tom Werner of Gravatar it became obvious there’s a lot of potential for combined forces, and I also saw a lot of parallels to Akismet, a product that does one thing, does it well, and has an open API so any platform can use it.So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic, and here we are. Here’s what we’ve done so far over the past few days:
- We transferred the Rails application and most of the avatar serving to our WordPress.com infrastructure and servers.
- Avatar serving is now more than three times as fast, and works every time.
- We moved this blog from Mephisto to WordPress.
Basically, we did the bare minimum required to stabilize and accelerate the Gravatar service, focusing a lot on making the gravatars highly available and fast. However our plans are much bigger than that. Here’s some of the things we’re looking to add and improve on the service:
- We’re going to make all of the Premium features free, and refund anyone who bought them in the last 60 days.
- Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
- Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
- From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
- From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
- Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN
rel="me"and hCard. - Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
- Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.
Of course like with all our products, the majority of development is going to be driven by you, so if you have any great ideas be sure to leave them in the comments so we can work them into our roadmap.
Thanks again to Tom Werner for creating such an awesome service and the Automattic team for getting it moved over so quickly.