WordPress.com Now Gravified
December 10, 2008 | Posted by Demitrious Kelly
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
joint
Okay, you’ve got me curious. You have any graphs you can share showing this spike? I’d love to see how much more WordPress.com added to the pull on gravatar.com. Also I’m curious if any special caching was added for it.
It seems gravatar will fill our lives! Next thing, even our email and documents will be sent with our pics. tks a lot, great product.
I can’t wait to hear more about the API! I’ve been waiting for a while and am excited to see what you have planned.
All that fuzz about a small image 🙂
hehehe I am happy.
Cool DK! 🙂
very happy for this news.~
Now that sounds promising, looking forward for enhancements and improvements to the already perfect Avatar System from my point of view 🙂
Love it, I already have Gravatar’s on my e-mail thanks to a Thunderbird Addon and am in the process of adding Gravatars to our charity marathon website so that every racer can have a picture next to their race entry 🙂
Thanks for a great service
congrats. thats some impressive usage.
word.
So much to look forward to 🙂
This is quite interesting. Seems like Gravater is to blogs what avatars are to forums.
I also have email Gravatars, thanks to the Message Faces add-on for Thunderbird. Putting a face on electronic communication is a Good Thing! Thanks to the folks behind Gravatar for getting it done.
I cannot find any info on incorporating my Gravatar icon into my WordPress site. I can only use my Blavatar. ???
Kudos – excellent job. I think the Gravtars work very well and are great for marketing.I wish the user interface had one more iota of instruction so you don’t have to guess when to use the back button, versus when to use the application buttons versus guessing what to do nextt but hey it works. Keep up the good work.
We hope that Gravatar will expand it’s reach from the blogs into the realm of webmail! We’ll make the first step and adopt it within Relenta (www.relenta.com), email-based contact and task manager.
Gmail has profile pictures, but they are only visible to other Gmail users. We hope that in the future all webmail platforms will use Gravatar.
Keep up the good work, folks!
[…] es jetzt schon alles gibt – Avatare, Gravatare und seit kurzem auch noch die Blavatare. Da soll sich noch einer auskennen. Ausprobiert wird […]
Just added gravatars to our blog. Very exciting!
Cool Hah
Great News, I just downloaded the WP Plugin and I can’t wait to see the first results 🙂
Sounds Good.
Kinda of cool way to associate pictures with emails and such. Sounds like this could be universal on the web, and able to be integrated into alot of areas…
i like gravatars!
however, i’m actually thinking about a new feature…
for example:
– i set a global avatar, ok
– i use it in 50 sites, ok
– in some of these i’d like to have a different (little)global avatar… i mean, in these 2 forums, i want to use another avatar…
so, it could be nice to be able to set in gravatar, the specific url in which every avatar should work… leaving however a global avatar working for the others…
this would give us more control… 🙂
I think the Gravtars work very well and are great for marketing.I wish the user interface had one more iota of instruction.
I just downloaded the WP Plugin and I can’t wait to see the first results
I also noticed that BlogEasy (www.blogeasy.com) has gravatars enabled.
simple and easy way to bring gravatar in your comments http://flexlearner.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/how-to-add-gravatar-to-your-wordpress-comments/ it just took me 5 minutes to do that.
I like the idea that my picture is following me around now(sort of). Pretty cool and a great idea!
I LOVE YOU PARA TODOS INTEGRANTES DESSE SITE!