Automattic, the fine folks who bring you Akismet (and WordPress.Com) have recently acquired/partnered with Gravatar. Gravatar is a service that serves up globally recognized avatars giving you the ability to have the save avatar everywhere you go! (remember all those forums where you have to choose from different avatars? With Gravatar, it’s portable – you can take it with you.)
Matt had this to say about the purchase: “Watching how Gravatar changed and evolved over the years I saw a service with great adoption and potential, but facing some classic problems of scale that successful sites are often lucky to run into. Scaling happens to be something my company, Automattic, is very good at, and as we started chatting with Tom Werner of Gravatar it became obvious there’s a lot of potential for combined forces, and I also saw a lot of parallels to Akismet, a product that does one thing, does it well, and has an open API so any platform can use it.So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic..”
A marriage made in heaven – great job Matt & Tom!
Update
Dougal Campbell wrote a quick n’ Easy Gravatar plugin – great job!
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