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.

This post was published by on December 13, 2006

About the Author: Thilak Rao works as a Social Media Expert. He is one of the first professional bloggers from India, and he loves to write, travel and click photos. Follow him on Twitter @thilak

  • http://www.napolux.com Napolux

    Just written a plugin for using MyBloglog like gravatar in wordpress comments…

    Take a look at my blog!!!

  • http://tech-buzz.net Thilak

    Napolux: Do they have a code just for showing Avatars on blog comments ?

    I thought it comes along with the tracker script

  • http://www.napolux.com Napolux

    They have. But you need to activate it in your mybloglog profile, and wait until staff let you use it. (Just waited 2 months)

    There’s no need with my plugin…

  • http://technospot.net/blogs/ Ashish Mohta

    Personally i dont like Gravatars.It was creating a problem.Mybloglog is pretty good.I am using it now.Ths for reminding me back

  • http://blogtalks.net/gravatar-20-is-back.html Gravatar 2.0 is Back!

    [...] piece of cake is already eaten by MyBlogLog and other similar services. I think, Gravatar will have to fight their way back into blogs. As a blogger, if you have already [...]

  • http://www.marketingorsearch.com/search-engine-analytics.aspx Search Engine Analytics

    Just found your blog today. Really like it – keep up the good work.Domain info more important than you think :-) Domain information such as DNS, age of domain and even the expiration date are used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains.Why are google doing this? Simply to get all the factors they can to get an internal “trust score”.This “trust score” is used to eliminate “doorway” pages and spam in the search result.I’M not saying that it’s working perfectly – but they are doing a pretty good job.