See Yourself Everywhere With Gravatar
by
on November 15, 2007,
Gravatar is a Web 2.0 plug in for blogs that allows you to see yourself everywhere you comment or participate online. It's a pretty neat way to "brand" yourself or your company with just a few simple clicks. Once you activate the Gravatar network for you, you begin to see your logo or image associated with every comment or post you make on Gravatar enabled blogs.
This application simplifies the process of branding and avatar association to a point where your Internet brand is only a click a way. All you have to do to use Gravatar is sign up, then click the confirmation link in your email. It's that simple.
I am torn about Gravatar for my personal use. It's been fun to try out, associating my avatar with the comments I leave and participation on other blogs. Seeing other people's logos or avatars has been nice also - it helps me to quickly find the comments and posts from the people I want to read.
What makes me pause is how one-track it is. The lack of an associated social aspect, or even of any other features like a profile page or comment feed function make this application have the potential to be a flash in the pan. With Web 2.0 taking off the way it is, applications flat out have to do more than one thing to survive.
Sure, Gravatar has "the look", it's simple, it provides a needed service, but it stops too soon. By not doing more to be interactive, Gravatar limits itself as an application. If it doesn't add more features, people who are using it now to brand themselves online will move on to the next branding application that offers them more.
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Svetlana Gladkova
doe
CopyrightLawSucks 
kwarren84 
Michael Fidler 
Jaime A. Restrepo 
Yolanda
I am re-posting my comment. The first time I posted it Profy deleted it - censorship in Russia is still a normal practice, I guess! I know Profy wants to be as big as TechCrunch, Mashable, etc., but even the big guys don’t dare to censor comments - even if they are inconvenient to them!
Gravatar is not new - it’s a 2-3 years old service!
I saw that Profy (after reading and deleting my comment) did another unthinkable for the big guys thing - edited the article after being published! Initially they said Gravatar is a “new” service!
Hello, Nikolay. I sent you a nice, personal email yesterday from here in the States thanking you for catching my typo and letting you know I had corrected the article accordingly by deleting the one instance of the word "new" in the first sentence, and also that since the comment was no longer apropos I would be deleting it. Leslie Poston
For one reason or another, I did not get that email.
Nikolay, I wonder why you are so aggressive toward Profy? The thing is we never moderate comments, the only thing that could have happened is the comment being caught by Akismet though I extract all the valid comments from there daily and actually there was no comment from you. Maybe you have forgotten to hit the “Submit Comment” button below? We have no censorship here and you should keep in mind that the only Russian thing here is the investment and the executive editor (me). All the authors are in the US and we do not implement any Russian laws here, Ok?
BTW, could you please avoid comparing us to bigger blogs since we are not actually competing with them as there is perfectly enough place in the world for all of us because readers need different approach.
As for the unthinkable thing of editing, you know perfectly well that it is not all that unthinkable. But I will definitely ask Leslie to edit the post for it to have the UPDATE with your contribution, and I hope it will suffice.
Svetlana, read Leslie’s comment first before accusing me of inability to properly post comments. I like Profy and read it daily (even several times a day). If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t bother to comment.
Nikolay, I’m afraid Leslie is unable to delete any comment on Profy, only I can delete or approve any comment that is caught as spam. And I did not remove any comment of yours, that is why I am pretty offended about your censorship remark - we are a 100% free publication.
And I am really happy to have such a passionate and devoted reader, thank you, I appreciate your loyalty and hope you will continue to contribute to our discussions here.
Svetlana, if my comment did not post, why did Leslie send me an email thanking me about the “typo”. Anyway, let’s not dig deeper into this.
Nikolay, from Leslie’s explanation I understood that she sent you an email after the second comment, the one that was actually posted. I will investigate it here and it will be a useful lesson for us here. Anyway, I agree with you absolutely, let’s not dig deeper into this. Thank you for your attention and your attention to the content on Profy.
I’ve actually created a Gravatar class if you click the link in my name. Loosely coupled and works like a dream - it also has a cache with an expiration date for the avatar - to save on loading times. It can merely load the avatar in locally.
Adam @ TalkPHP.com