Gravatar 2.0 Out in February. Should I Care?
If you don’t know what a Gravatar is, it stands for “globally recognized avatar,” or those teeny thumbnail mug shots of you automatically posted on blogs whenever you leave a comment. Gravatar has been down since December and this has been messing up blog layouts around the blogsphere, with those gravatar placeholders and slowdowns in some cases.
Blogging Pro reports that Gravatar version 2.0 should be out this February. My interest in gravatars has mellowed down, though, and I can probably say the same for other people.
What’s so cool about gravatars is that they’re universal. You just sign up, upload your mug shot, and then use the email address you associated with that account when you leave a comment on other blogs. No need to upload images multiple times, since blogs and sites that support Gravatars will retrieve the image from Gravatar’s servers.
What’s not so good about it? Several reasons. For one, it can tend to slow down your blog’s loading speed when you have comments with Gravatars. Remember that your blog will have to load up the images from a third-party server. What if the servers are bogged down or offline altogether? Second, fans of minimalistic design are not too happy with cluttering their blogs with ugly mugshots of total strangers.
Actually even if you’re not too inclined with minimalistic designs, sometimes you would agree that third-party images tend to clutter the layout—especially if these are beyond your control. Oh, and speaking of images beyond your control, Gravatars can also be subject to abuse. And there’s a chance (though small) that gravatars can be used by your commenters to insert potentially malicious code (such as infected graphic files, and the like).
Gravatar 2.0 could be worth the try. But that won’t probably be on top of my priority list for blog-related designing anytime soon.
“fans of minimalistic design are not too happy with cluttering their blogs with ugly mugshots of total strangers.”
And people are getting strongarmed into having it?
Bryan Price said this on January 21, 2007 2:02 am
Good observation, Bryan. I guess I was meaning to refer to blogs of other people. I guess I should have rephrased. Perhaps “fans of minimalistic design ... not too happy with reading/seeing visiting blogs with ugly mugshots of total strangers.”
Then again, why would they visit such blogs?
Well, yes, maybe they’re getting strongarmed into it.
The Sheriff said this on January 21, 2007 3:28 am