Beyond the avatar with new, open-source tools
Gravatar has been a humble profile picture service for over two decades. Your globally recognized avatar, linked to an email address, traveling with you around the web.
With many billions of avatars served across sites like WordPress.com, Slack, GitHub, and ChatGPT.
We want to give you a preview of the next evolution of Gravatar. Building on our legacy by empowering users to claim control of their digital identities and equipping developers with the open-source tools they need to build a better web.
A New Approach to Identity
Gravatar redefines online identity by linking it to an email address rather than a name. This subtle yet profound difference opens a world of possibilities — allowing you to curate multiple profiles for various facets of your life, whether work, family, or play.
Even be anonymous. We support that, too!
On sites and apps integrated with Gravatar, easily import and share profile details like your avatar, bio, and interests for a seamless and engaging experience.
Your Online Business Card
What’s old is new again, and Gravatar is the original ‘link-in-bio’ tool. Every Gravatar account comes with a free public profile page.
If you haven’t visited your profile in a while, now is an excellent time to check out the recent updates.
Use the convenient QR code to share with those you meet in real life, replacing old-fashioned business cards. Add links to your social accounts, contact information, calendars, payment methods, and more. Look for new integrations and personalization settings in the months to come.
Privacy First Profiles
With Gravatar, you always decide what information gets shared and when.
You may choose to have your avatar and display name public. But you may want information like your phone number or your birthday private. Gravatar will ask you to confirm before sharing non-public data with a new site or app. And we’ll soon have tools to help keep up with where profile data is used.
Users set permissions, developers build worry-free.
A major benefit of Gravatar is that if you need to update any information, you can just do it once. The change is then instantly available to every site you’ve shared it with.
Powerful APIs For Developers
Gravatar’s APIs offer developers unparalleled flexibility and power to customize user experiences using Gravatar profile data.
The existing free API allows for easy implementation of avatars and basic profile details across websites and applications.
Later this year, our API service will extend this functionality with access to more data users have opted to share, including job titles, interests, contact details, and social connections. This expanded dataset will open up new possibilities for developers around e-commerce, CRM, content algorithms, fraud detection, and personalized user experiences.
End users will always control when and if their data is shared.
By leveraging Gravatar’s APIs, developers can significantly reduce user onboarding friction and tap into a vast network of millions of profiles for a more interconnected web experience.
Join Us On This Journey
Gravatar fosters a more connected, accessible, and user-centric internet. We are just getting started. We’d love to have you along for the ride.
Subscribe to our blog below to be notified of future updates.
Developers, join our beta waitlist for early access to the tools coming soon.
Gravatar Blog
10 responses
I, Can’t Wait To Become Beta Tester🩵👽🩵
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[…] Gravatar îs evolving by creating a destination for users to control their digital identities. […]
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Any interest in fediverse integration or use?
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100% yes! We’re actively looking into it. Any specific way of integrating that you would find most useful?
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This might actually just me misunderstanding the situation but I think the biggest issue with the fediverse is that a person’s identity is tied to their server, which means if you want to follow someone you have to do this whole weird dance of copy pasting the url and stuff into your home server search bar or whatever.
What would be nice is if I could use gravatar to login to my home mastodon server, but then login to other servers to follow or interact, all under the same identity. Maybe that’s way too far afield idk.
For awhile I hoped that maybe Tim Berner-Lee’s Solid project would be a potential solution to this identity issue but that project hasn’t seemed to get much traction.
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That’s great food for thought and I’m sharing with our team. I was a fan of Solid as well. We’ll see how close we can get to what you describe 🙂
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Not sure if I’m totally following, but I’m also super interested in this whole identity conversation and potential tie ins with the fediverse. Was excited to see this! 🎉
Basically I want one digital identity that represents me that I can use anywhere. And not something that’s tied to another brand or corporation (like Gmail) but my own personal brand and domain. What I’m super frustrated with outside the fediverse is why do I need a separate account for everything when it’s all just pieces of my digital identity? They all represent different parts of me and I don’t like that it’s so fragmented and also brande/controlled by those other entities. So instead of having an account for email that’s branded by Google or Microsoft or whoever I have one that’s my personal identifier and can be used everywhere kinda thing. No clue if that even makes sense cuz I’m still trying to figure out some of this, but I know I’m excited for it to change!
David Aslan French, you probably have already tried the ActivityPub WordPress plugin I’m guessing? Idk if it solves what you’re asking but it might be fun to explore if you haven’t.
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Why are our gravatars connected to WordPress.com? This is offensive to some of the WordPress.org community.
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Thanks for the question! Gravatar is a free service, but it is not free for us to host and maintain. Connecting with WordPress.com makes it easier and more economical to maintain on our end. However, we are actively looking into ways to minimize the connection with Gravatar and WordPress.com.
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Hello! 👋 I’m really new to WordPress and Gravatar, and not a hosting expert by any means. But I’m curious about this as well. You mentioned hosting and maintaining being the primary issue, so why not let people self host or host their Gravatar somewhere that’s not dotcom? I’m sure you’ve probably thought about that and would love to understand more details or constraints.
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