It’s about time to look for some alternatives regarding Gravatars (those personal images that decorate every single comment). The server responses of gravatar.com go from very slow to none at all, which massively increases loading time of comment pages.

Shame is that there are over 4,5 million Gravatars registered and the service now risks it’s leading position for global personal avatars to someone else.

BloggingPro even reports about the lack of effort the inventor of the Gravatars has left for the project. Now that’s sad, but there definitely is a reasonable explanation for it. I assume the developer won’t make a living from Gravatar alone — but that’s another story and probably none of my business.

Pavatar

The Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) is a personal picture hosted on your webspace which is then used by websites to display whenever referring to content provided by YOU, the user.

Watching out for other services, I stumbled upon Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) which was developed by Jeena due to the desperation of Gravatar.com’s unreliability. It really looks promising!

Favicons

And how about using a website’s favicon as an Avatar? Unfortunately this is no solution for users that don’t have a website. But if you’re running one that’s powered by WordPress you should have a look at Favatars — a WordPress plugin that acquires and displays favicons from all comments and pingbacks. I’m using that one right now.

Comvatars

Comvatars is also a WordPress plugin that checks several services for an avatar. It includes a fallback-system which makes sure that at least something is displayed as avatar. Comvatars works with:

• Registered Comvatars
• Gravatars
• Favatars (Favicons)

What are your thoughts and suggestions about how a global avatar should work like?

Posted in Rants, Tags:gravatar, icon, offline

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