See Yourself Everywhere With Gravatar

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.