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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want to move from using Gravatar... to using Gravatar through Avatars.io. If I have to manually support all of these URLs, there's not a ton of benefit from just using the site specific URLs as it is, and I now have a dependency (And thus risk) on avatars.io. Maybe I'm missing something that this enables? (I mean, the URLs are certainly pretty, clean and consistent!)

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Agreed. What WOULD be helpful is a service that would look for an avatar on various services, and serve the first one it finds. So if a user doesn't have a gravatar, it looks up their facebook based on their email - and uses that avatar, then twitter, etc.

That's a great idea. As long as the info is public then that would totally be something worth doing.

We'll keep that in mind as we improve the service.

If you did this, I am moving my apps' avatars to you. This would be a very cool feature! :)

Just signed up and it redirected me to getchute.com which threw me a bit...

Sorry about that confusion.

Avatars.io is an app we built on top of our platform. The app credentials you get are for Chute which also gives you access to all the other features of the API.

If you want to see more of that, you can check out http://picture.io

This would be great - and if it finds a few, give the user the option to select one of the ones it finds on the various social services.

Hi,

We made it so that you don't have to stop using Gravatar, but can expand to include other services.

Probably the biggest win, though, is that you can also allow for your users to easily upload their own.

Greg

I guess I am still confused. I don't mean to belittle what you're doing, I just don't understand the value it adds for me. I suppose maybe your gems or prebuilt packages make it more transparent, but at the end of the day, my code still has to know whether to load avatars.io/{facebook,twitter,gravatar} etc, thus there isn't really a significant layer of abstraction? (Like I said, really just trying to wrap my head around it here)

I think if your app is based solely on email addresses now, Gravatar will serve you well.

When we started building this service, a lot of people wanted a simple way to handle their own avatars - that is letting users upload their own photos and not send them to Gravatar to do that. That's likely the biggest win for everyone.

Also, a lot of apps are using more than email now so our goal is to offer that as an option. Being able to simple ask someone which avatar they want to use and storing that, as opposed to just an email gives the users more options - and we'll keep track as they change their avatars.

Not sure that clarifies it much, but that's a big part of how we built this particular solution.

"I think if your app is based solely on email addresses now, Gravatar will serve you well."

Not necessarily. We're using emails as the identifier for matchist.com but based on some initial research (you can easily determine if an email has a Gravatar image associated with it), not everybody has a Gravatar.

Most sites' users aren't technically sophisticated enough to know how to or want to use Gravatar.

This user is perfectly sophisticated enough. However I refuse to use Gravatar since it requires having a Wordpress account whose terms and conditions I will not agree to.

I don't recall having a wordpress account and I've been using gravatar for about three years now.

Well you hit this page: https://en.gravatar.com/site/signup/

They send you an email that says this:

By signing up for a Gravatar account I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy located at the following link:

https://en.gravatar.com/site/terms-of-service

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