Gravatar
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Gravatar is an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar, the concept of which was invented by Tom Werner.
On Gravatar users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for popular blogging software; when the user posts a comment on such a blog that requires an e-mail address, the blogging software checks whether that e-mail address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment.
The size of an avatar on Gravatar is restricted to 80 by 80 pixels. If the uploaded avatar is larger or smaller, the avatar is scaled appropriately. Each Gravatar is rated with an MPAA-style age recommendation, which allows webmasters to control the content of the Gravatars displayed on their website.
To eliminate spam, e-mail addresses are hashed with the MD5 cryptographic hash function. This prevents spambots from harvesting e-mail addresses.
[edit] Gravatar 2.0
For some time the Gravatar service remained unmaintained. The maker became busy with working on a new version of the service, as Gravatar's popularity grew and more bandwidth was required. On 15 February 2007, "Gravatar 2.0" was launched. Besides an improved server script, users also noticed other improvements, such as being able to crop and use an image already hosted on the Internet. Support for two gravatars per account was added, between which the user can easily switch. "Gravatar Premium" was also launched, which allows unlimited e-mail addresses and Gravatars per account.
On 11 June 2007, Tom Werner announced that 32,000 new users had signed up since the launch of Gravatar 2.0. [1]
On October 18, 2007 Automattic acquired Gravatar. After doing so they made all premium services free, increase the speed in which avatars were served by three fold, and refunded those who had bought premium services in the past 60 days, among other things.[2]
