Gravatar Acquired by Automattic

If you regular comment on blogs, then I’m pretty sure that you might have heard of Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar). It was one of the most popular services used by everyone to take their avatar from blog to blog. Not long ago, the service was hit by scaling issues and had to shut down for a short time. Automattic, the creators of WordPress have now decided take over Gravatar.

Automattic has unbelievable skills in server scaling and architecture. They’ve already proved their skills with WordPress and Akismet anti-spam service. In the past few days, Automattic has made some improvements to Gravatar. Here’s a list:

• They have transferred the Rail’s application and most of the avatar serving from Gravatar to WordPress.com infrastructure.
• Avatar serving now works every time and works more than three times faster.

The future of Gravatar under Automattic looks bright and shiny. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic has announced their upcoming plans for Gravatar:

• Premium services like multiple email ids and avatars will be given for free. Anybody who bought premium services in the past 60 days will be refunded.
• Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
• Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
• From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
• From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
• Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN rel="me" and hCard.
• Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
• Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.

I’m looking forward to see some these changes go live. Currently, this blog serves avatars from Yahoo!-owned MyBlogLog. I’ll probably switch back to Gravatar, if things go faster and better. We can also expect Gravatar to be integrated in the next release of WordPress. If that happens, it’ll surely give a big blow to MyBlogLog.

[Via: Dailyapps]