Wow, I must be way behind the times as I’m 6 days late posting this. This has to be the perfect match for Gravatar! I have always loved the concept behind Gravatar, although have never wanted to integrate it due to the issues they were having serving the images. However, now the problem is solved I’ll be looking into it straight away.

What is a Gravatar?

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?

Basically, if you enter your email address when you submit a comment or forum post, it will go to Gravatar and see if you have uploaded an avatar. If you have, then it will display this for you. This allows you to have the same avatar automatically displayed on lots of sites, without the frustration of registering and uploading an avatar to each individual one.

Who are Automattic?

Automattic Inc. is a startup from a handful of people passionate about making the web a better place. So far we’re best known for our work on WordPress and other projects but we have a lot of other interesting things in the pipeline as well. We are strong believers in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under licenses like the GPL.

Automattic are great people who certainly know how to scale web applications (Think about WordPress.com - ouch). They are the perfect people to buy this idea, as their expertise can make Gravatar work (sorry, but it just didn’t before).