Automattic Acquires Gravatar

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1. Dictionary
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 7:34 pm

   Duncan are you hiding something?

   You haven’t explain what Gravtar is or what it does. Geeze, I have to go their links to find out. Thanks for nothing…You should’ve summarize better like.

   Gravatar is sorta like iphone icon avatars which allows you identify posts on web forums, and what’s not.

2. Dictionary
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 7:38 pm

   Here’s photo…

   http://gravatar.files.wordpres.....emails.png

3. Duncan Riley
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 7:39 pm

   Dictionary
   which part of
   “Gravatar offers a “globally recognized avatar,” a 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows users from weblog to weblog, appearing beside their name when they comment on gravatar enabled sites.”
   was not clear?

4. AW
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 7:50 pm

   Interesting model…

   Acquire a company and immediately make all its premium features free. Guess you can make money while being benevolent at the same time?

5. gilltots
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 7:52 pm

   Duncan, you have to find out what the terms of the deal are. Or it didn’t happen.

6. Fabian Schonholz
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 8:01 pm

   This is an interesting acquisition. Why couldn’t Wordpress implement it? What so special about the 80×80 avatar that follows you? How much did it pay for it? How big is Gravatar?

   I do not see the point unless Gravatar is really small and Worpress not only wanted the functionality but also the team and it was just a payoff ball park price.

7. Jaymon
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 8:10 pm

   @Fabian

   I would say the price was pretty small and they wanted the team more than anything. Likewise, I would assume the team wanted to be taken under the wing of Automattic, so this was a win-win all around it looks like…

8. David
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

   The test will be whether gravatars are responsive enough to be used here in the comments section of techcrunch.

9. Aaron Brazell
   

   October 17th, 2007 at 8:54 pm

   Good move on Automarttic’s part. If this acquisition didn’t happen, WordPress.com avatars would quickly drown Gravatars whenever their team decided to open it up. In this way, the technology is acquired, Gravatar meets a good match doing the same thing and the automattic team gets more well rounded.

10. tesh
    

    October 17th, 2007 at 9:34 pm

    It is great news that Gravatars will be free and integrated with wordpress. Hooray for bloggers.

11. Wes
    

    October 17th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    Good to see that they have made all the premium features free. It would seem to me that they other better ideas but we will have to wait and see over the coming days and months.

12. Napolux
    

    October 17th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    Glad to see something new in the Gravatar’s story. But maybe it’s too late…

    After several months of “no gravatars” Most of all WordPress bloggers & gravatar’s user have switched to MyAvatatars plugin I’ve made about 9-10 months ago

13. Jonathan Street
    

    October 18th, 2007 at 2:35 am

    Doesn’t MyBlogLog offer the same functionality along with far more compelling reasons for bloggers/webmasters to implement the plugin?

    It will be interesting to see how/if this moves to the wordpress.org codebase.

14. Stefan
    

    October 18th, 2007 at 3:25 am

    MyBlogLog does already do this - and apparently far more succesful and widespread. I had never heard of Gravatar, but I do bump into my own ‘avatar’ (effectively my logo on my profilepage on MyBlogLog LOL) on countless blogs I visit

15. Norm
    

    October 18th, 2007 at 5:04 am

    I just tried signing up and it seems that the premium account still costs and isn’t free as this article states - strange!

16. Jonathan Street
    

    October 18th, 2007 at 7:36 am

    I don’t think MyBlogLog displays avatars by posts on every blog but on many it does. I assume you need to install a plugin to get this functionality rather than slapping a widget in the sidebar.

    There is no reason why it couldn’t be done that way it would just take more work.

    I’ve never used MyBlogLog so I could be wrong on the plugin vs sidebar widget issue anyway.

17. RYK
    

    October 18th, 2007 at 10:10 am

    Gravatar is a very interesting property. It creates a universal id that can be used everywhere. I suspect that this will become major competition to openid.

18. RYK
    

    October 18th, 2007 at 10:15 am

    wonder if Gravatar will be integrated into the native WP install. Potential restrictive practice !

19. PixelRobot
    

    October 21st, 2007 at 9:54 am

    I wrote a little plug-in for bbPress that implements Gravatar avatars, and I was having a lot of performance problems. Since the acquisition it has been working smoothly.

    From a development point of view Gravatars is surprisingly easy to implement. You don’t have to worry about anything, like keeping avatars in your server, limit their size, make forms for people to update… for small developments it’s a really useful tool.