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Gravatar Still Dead: Time for a Replacement?

by David Peralty on November 20th, 2006 10 Comments

Gravatar is a service that links your e-mail address with an avatar image of your own choosing. It is very popular, and also a great way to find comments from people in a massive amount of comments. It is also a great way to express yourself through an image on other blogs.

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Unfortunately, the service has not been “working” for quite some time. The last post on the Gravatar blog is around three weeks old, saying that the new servers and system should be up soon.

The pre-renders are complete, the mod_magnet script for lighttpd is done and tested, I’m just waiting on the setup of the new servers. Once setup is complete, I’ll get this sucker deployed, and we’ll see what happens. I’m still working on the Gravatar 2.0 admin site, I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for your continued patience.

For all I know, the site could be up and running later today, but I am pretty sick of waiting. I haven’t enabled Gravatars on BloggingPro yet because it ran too slow when it did work, and now it does not work correctly.

I know the service was created and ran out of the goodness of Tom Werner’s heart, but this is getting rediculous.

Other than getting people to adopt the service, why hasn’t someone created a newer/better gravatar type service? It is just an image hosting service basically. And with over a month since Tom posted that the new Gravatar service was “imminent”, we are all frustrated and tired of waiting.

Someone fill this niche please! Because it does not look like Tom is really passionate about doing it anymore. Again, I could be wrong, and the new service could launch today, but if you think you can do better, now would be the time to try because there are hundreds of frustrated people commenting on the rediculousness of the Gravatar developments.

Categories: General



Comments

  1. Patrick says: 11/20/2006

    There is something out there: Pavatar

    The Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) is a personal picture hosted on your webspace which is then used by websites to display whenever referring to content provided by YOU, the user. An example would be if you made a comment or a site posting where an avatar is required. This way, delivering your Personal Avatar is peripheral and can be (nearly) anonymous. This option inhibits companies from collecting personal information about your habits on the web.

  2. Chris Cree says: 11/22/2006

    You might check out MyBlogLog. They have a simple script that will add avatars for their members automatically when they comment.

  3. Alvin says: 12/6/2006

    Is Gravatar dead?

    :-(

  4. Al Maw says: 12/20/2006

    I’ve been trying to think of a central resource for avatars that already has a bunch of them, and flickr sprung to mind. I might cook up a wordpress plug-in that best-efforts finding an avatar on gravatar.com, then pavatar, then flickr.

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