About Gravatar 2.0
I am very happy that Gravatar 2.0 is going to be coming out again this month. I am impressed that there is now going to be an integrated cropping system for larger images. I am very happy that I will be getting in on the private beta soon. And I am EXCEEDINGLY happy that Gravatars can now be dynamically changed by outside programmes and rated by the users. This means several things to many different people but I am going to try to explain it in as few words as possible:
No wait times for Gravatars - the wait time for your gravatar to be uploaded, rated and accepted took way too long. Now, users can rate their own gravatars and they will appear instantly. This means you can change your gravatar as easily as you can change your avatar on MSN, on any message board and as your display pic for Mac OS X or Windows. Which leads me to my next point…
Plugins - We can now create plugins for numerous applications that will allow you to create your own gravatars based on content already in the application. I am working on learning Objective-C so I can be a better Mac OS X programmer - but there are a couple of web applications I would extend with Gravatar. The first being vBulletin, seeing as the larger forums need a better avatar management service. Plus, not only that, but seeing as gravatars are associated by e-mail address, that makes it even easier - considering that most of the larger forum software packages (vBulletin, phpBB and Invision) allow for requiring an e-mail address to be supplied.