Gravatar Becomes a Social Network of 22 Million In a Day

Most of us are probably quite familiar with the term Gravatar. This is especially true if you have a WordPress.com account or have ever left a comment on a blog. Up until now, your Gravatar was just a way for you to manage your avatar and carry it around with you. You gave your email address, uploaded a photo, and Gravatar did the rest. You probably never thought twice about it.

Now, Automattic (the company behind WordPress and Gravatar), has decided to take things to the next level. Your Gravatar account has become it’s own full-fledged public profile.

What if your Gravatar wasn’t just an image that showed up when you comment, but you could attach more of yourself to it to better represent your style, flair, and personality not just with more photos but with links to all the cool stuff you’re doing around the web.

Everything you choose to share on your shiny new Gravatar profile is open to the world. Nothing is locked behind some proprietary API. You can populate your profile with links to your other websites and profiles and each of these accounts is verified so you don’t have to worry about fakers.

You can edit your profile on WordPress.com by clicking here, but I would recommend editing it from the Gravatar site by clicking this link. The interface on Gravatar.com is much nicer and Gravatar is the engine behind the scenes, anyway. Might as well take it to the source.

What will Gravatar aka WordPress aka Automattic do with these new profiles? That remains to be seen. In their announcement, they say they could “do cool stuff in the future like aggregate your content or update your avatar in multiple places when you update Gravatar.” This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Gravatar is basically a sleeper in he social networking game. By knowing your email addresses, they can track you all over the place and pull in your content from pretty much anywhere (if you allowed them to). I’m sure this is the first small step towards something big and I can’t wait to see what that might be.

via TheNextWeb

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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