Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:
As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!
People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.
We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:
- Profile pages are completely public, and accessible via nice short links, for example http://gravatar.com/beau (get your link from the bottom of your profile page)
- We’ve improved our support for translations, and are now looking for your help to get the Gravatar website translated into as many languages as possible
- foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)
- You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!
- That old profile editor of ours was way too ugly and hard to use, so we’ve made it easier to use and to see what’s going on (and to add more options, such as…)
- Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass as the background:
As always, if you don’t want any of your information to be public, then please just log into your account and go to “Edit My Profile” to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!
Developers; get your developer hats on because there are some especially cool things coming for you soon 😉