Gravatar expands with fresh profile-as-a-service
Gravatar moves beyond avatars with fresh service.
If you leave a comment on this blog post and you’ve ever registered your email address with a Gravatar-affiliated service, you’ll see a profile picture (avatar) next to your comment.
That’s regarding the extent of what most people know regarding Gravatar, a service with 200 million users that WordPress firm Automattic owns.
But it’s regarding to become much more prevalent.
Gravatar has launched “profile-as-a-service,” which will do far more than share your image.
The idea is that you can create an entire profile, and developers can use an API to pull this data into their applications.
When users sign up for these applications, data from their profiles can automatically be pulled in and used as necessary, helping both the developer and the user save time.
As an example of a potential use case, I think regarding the podcast guest service I used to own. Fresh users have to create a profile from scratch, counting their photo, city, social media accounts, website links, and bio. With Gravatar’s API, much of this information could automatically be added to the profiles.
Gravatar users can choose what’s on their profile and have multiple profiles tied to different email addresses.
There’s a domain name angle to this, too. Gravatar profiles can be created as public profiles hosted on Gravatar, and users will be able to link any domain name to these public profiles. Gravatar will soon offer domain registration to connect to the profiles, starting with .link but later extending to other top level domains.
