WordPress.com Now Gravified

I still remember the post Matt made back when we announced that we’d acquired Gravatar.com… “Of course I should be able to have my avatar wherever I go! Of course email is a great way to key it! Of course there should be an open API for any platform!” And we meant it. We have always intended to make Gravatar.com THE avatar system for WordPress.com — It just made sense.

We flipped the switch on the evening of Friday Dec 5, 2008.  I’m happy to report that there was only minimal headache involved all around.  I’m also happy to note that the extra traffic (to the tune of something like 900 requests per second during peak usage) had a fairly negligible impact on Gravatars infrastructure.  I mention this to lay to rest any doubts that you might have about Gravatars ability to handle the extra requests that even high traffic web services might send our way.

Just as WordPress.com will continue to focus on being the best hosted blogging platform that it can be, Gravatar will focus on being the best Avatar platform that it can be. We’ll continue to grow both products, and continue to mature the integration between them. We’re also working on eventually allowing UI integration with non Automattic owned sites (but lets not get ahead of ourselves.)

I’m looking forward to announcing some more really cool stuff for both developers and users…  Some API goodness, and some UI improvements.  I’ll also continue working, as always, under the hood to make Gravatar as fast and reliable as possible.

Cheers until then! DK