Gravatar profiles are now live. The fun thing about these are that they look handy, every linked service is verified, they’re as easy to link as Gravatars (hash of email), and they’re as open as Gravatar, meaning that with the email hash you can get all information someone has made public, in any format you like.
ooh, excellent!
Something I don’t like about the new public profiles is having my email address published if I decide to use it as my contact information. I think it’d be more useful to have something like a contact form automatically generated a la flavors.me.
I was looking for info as to how to link to them using just the hash, but couldn’t find it. But I figured it out easily enough: http://gravatar.com/hash will redirect to the user’s profile.
So my non-email-giving-away link is http://gravatar.com/0994d5e2e158a24ba8017c2525d78263
That might be useful info to document somewhere, for plugin/theme developers.
We’re going to be doing some more posts in the near future on how to get useful data out of this and how to use it, as that link format is just the tip of the iceberg 😉
Awesome!
I always wondered how you guys would ever get any benefit out of the Gravatar.com service. It seemed like a rather insane service to be providing for free, but it all makes a little more sense now. Great job 🙂
I’m not sure I’ll be making use of it on any of my own sites just yet, but I can definitely see how this could be a really useful for many others.
Any easy way to register users for the Gravatar service on an external site would be terrific too. In the past I saw that as a bad idea for you guys since the only real traffic you received (other than having your servers hammered with avatar requests) was on registration, but with this new profile page system that is no longer the case. With an external registration system, you may get more registrations, therefore more profile views. Perhaps an idea for the future? Or maybe I’m pre-emptying something that’s already in the pipe-line perhaps?
Ryan, there has always been benefit… ever noticed how many links the Gravatar domain gets?
It is a different site, so multiplies the Google juice Automattic gets to play with.
It will be even more powerful when WordPress ships with followed links to Gravatar profiles, but nofollow or no links to personal blogs… a very simple central registration system would do it.
Of course every external link to personal sites from Gravatar is nofollow.
I understand that, but I’d have thought the number of links was too small to justify the amount of processing power required to serve all those avatars. It seemed more like a purely altruistic service for the worldwide web community. With some direct links from sites using the Gravatar service that value to Automattic will have jumped considerably I assume. And it will have use for many site owners too.
I’m only guessing though. I have no idea how much it costs to serve all those avatars (although I’d have guessed it would be a hell of a lot!).
That’s cool
I think I’m going to play with Gravatar and try to hook it into http://scr.im/ since that service is all about email addresses
@Otto-
Help a noob out, buddy. You posted your non-email-giving-away link as http://gravatar.com/0994d5e2e158a24ba8017c2525d78263, but I”m not clear as to where you derived the alpha-numeric ID. ???
Never mind! I figured it out. MD5 hex code, making mine http://gravatar.com/060c050f5e4dc42590ad9b1a7028cd52
Great stuff, Dan!
I’m sure I will thank you for this however,
I do not understand what this is about. Could you please explain to a non computer literate person what I do with gravatar other than have my picture with my post?
So far, you’ve probably only seen gravatars used in blog comments but they can also be used anywhere you provide an email address, like a forum, or any other social web site. Now any social web site that has your email can also automatically grab anything from your gravatar profile, not just a little picture. So for example, there could be a little twitter button under your picture that links to your twitter feed. This is you and only you because these connections are verified by gravatar.
by the way I love this theme – it suits your site!
That sounds… AWESOME!
Is there a way to disable the Gravatar profile without impacting my WP.com account?
Sure, just remove your info.
Is it that simple, or am I missing something?
If I replace my name on the Gravatar ‘edit profile’ with nothing, it substitutes my username. I can also replace it with just my initials. But then that Gravatar profile editing impacts my WordPress byline when I leave comments ’round the web or when we syndicate my stuff to Technologizer.