Now With Full Profiles
You’ve been using Gravatar for a long time as a way to show a little bit of your identity around the web. Everywhere you dropped an email, be it a comment or the creation of an account, the owner of that website could choose to use your details to load up the picture that you’d decide to associate with that email address. Last night we rolled out the first step in bringing a whole lot more context and personality to your presence online.
You didn’t think the design update was the only change we made, did you? Every gravatar now supports the addition of full profile information against it, so that you can paint a much richer picture of who you are. You can upload a bunch of your favorite photos to your profile (they don’t have to be gravatars at all), and you can even verify your ownership of other online profiles and services. When you verify that you own something, people will be able to tell this is your account and not some imposter.
We’re continuing the tradition of complete openness that Gravatar has been known for, so nothing you put into your profile will be locked behind proprietary APIs or a scary terms of service — what you choose to share in your profile will be open to the world.
You’ll find some cool features on the new profiles: you can have a gallery of your favorite photos, add a variety of contact methods, and link your other profiles. Every linked account is verified so you know it’s not an impostor, and we also might be able to do cool stuff in the future like aggregate your content or update your avatar in multiple places when you update Gravatar.
While we’re all getting familiar with this new system, you will only be able to view your own profile on Gravatar.com, so you’ll have a bit of time to spruce it up before we’re out of beta. Profiles will become public for everyone soon so make sure to check yours out and update it to include (or leave out) exactly what you want. If you remove all information from your profile, then other people will only be able to see your Gravatar, just like right now.
If you’re running a website that already uses gravatars, we’ll have some more information soon on how you can make the most of these new profiles!
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