Automattic Purchases Gravatar

It wasn’t so long ago that Gravatar was all the rage around the blogosphere. Who wouldn’t want a globally recognized avatar? But problems with the service, combined with the emergence of the popular MyBlogLog avatar, seemed to have spelled the doom of Gravatar.

Now it looks like the service has been revived with Automattic’s recent acquisition of Gravatar. If anyone can turn this service into a success, it is the makers of WordPress. So what does this mean for Gravatar? And will the MyBlogLog avatar lose its popularity? Here is what Automattic has to say about their plans for the new service:

• We’re going to make all of the Premium features free, and refund anyone who bought them in the last 60 days.
• Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
• Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
• From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
• From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
• Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN rel="me" and hCard.
• Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
• Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.

It looks like the main beneficiaries of this plugin will be WordPress.com users, but I would expect to see the revival of Gravatar plugins appearing on WordPress.org blogs around the blogosphere once everything gets implemented.