Gravatar in a New Avatar- Now With Full Profiles

Blogging, Internet

We all have been using Gravatar for a long time to show our identity around the web. Wherever you drop an email address, be it a comment or the creation of an account, the owner of that website could show your photo associate with that email address. Now Gravatar can show a lot more info than only photo.

We have already explained what gravatar is in our earlier post. 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.

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 login to your Gravatar account and select My Account>edit my profile. You can upload a bunch of your favorite photos to your profile, 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.

Gravatar follows tradition of complete openness, so whatever 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.

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.