Gravatar Alternatives

Gravatar was a great service, it helped commentators to express themselves through avatars on blog comments. It quickly became popular with over 90,000 accounts and 4.5 billion images served, but it has been dead for quite sometimes now. 

Thesedays, bloggers consider removing Gravatar’s because they don’t work resulting in slow pageloads. So I went looking for an alternative.

MyBlogLog

MyBlogLog which recently got converted from a blog statistics service to a social network has a feature which allows Wordpress and MoveableType users to show MyBlogLog avatar next to comments. This one works directly without any code insertion, Just Edit your Blog Settings and enable Faces on Comments. It’ll take about 24 hours to reflect this change on your blog. The only disadvantage is that we don’t have much control over the look and feel of these avatars.

Pavatar

Pavatar is the short form of Personal Avatar. It was born out of the desperation of Gravatar’s unreliability. I haven’t tried it yet, but they surely look promising. They even have Wordpress Plugin to make this easier for you

Other alternatives include Favatars and Comvatars which provide on-site avatar for your commentators. Majority of folks don’t prefer this one, but go ahead and give it a try.