Gravatars
The internet loves its fads. Flickr, deli.ciou.us, Browse Happy, Spread Firefox, XFN, and so on. Another relatively recent trend is the use of Gravatars. Let’s talk about them.
Your common or garden variety avatar is usually found on crap message boards — they’re basically icons and images people use to make their posts stand out from among the others and help identify a particular author. Often, they will come in the form of a pixellated image of Orlando Bloom or another actor from Lord of the Rings. They will sometimes animate. They’ll usually be ugly and distracting and sometimes, they’ll be trying to be funny, and failing.
Gravatars are ‘Globally Recognised Avatars’. The idea is that sites that have implemented Gravatars will query the central Gravatar website when someone posts a comment, check the commentator’s email address against the Gravatar database, and if there’s a match, spit out an image and return it to the original website. This way, you have one avatar image for every website you post comments on, one image to change when you grow tired of Orlando Bloom and want to have a kitten instead.
Because this idea has grown up from the design blog lot, we’ve so far been spared the full horror of message board avatars with badly-Photoshopped, poor-quality GIFs of Gandalf-as-furry. Gravatars are limited to being at most 80×80 pixels as well, so there’s a certain amount of standardisation going on here, and I’ve seen some fairly attractive examples (as attractive as an 80×80 image ever can be, anyway). But, as with most of these things on the internet, I’ll look, take notice briefly, and then put the whole thing aside and wait for the fuss to die down.
Except this time, I can’t. I have to have one myself.
Wasn’t there a Decepticon called Gravatar?
Indulge me for a moment while I tangent. There’s a well-respected design blog known as Mezzoblue, the author of which (Dave Shea) came up with a new way of sorting comments that caused some small controversy briefly. The idea was that anonymous comments would be allowed, but they would be coloured a light grey against the website’s grey background. Anonymous comments therefore faded in and were easier to overlook. At the same time, Dave fixed things so that comments written by himself were much more noticeable than all the other comments.
So, a hierarchy was born, with Shea at the top, followed by identified commentators, followed by anonymous commentators, with comments visually styled to reflect that hierarchy. Now, if you wish to comment anonymously you still can, but the risk is that nobody will bother to read what you’ve written. I did try to read all comments for a while, but on a popular site like Mezzoblue, where comments can run to 30 or 40 as a matter of course, I found it was very easy to just scroll straight past anonymous comments due to their near-invisibility.
Let’s swing back to Gravatars. Though I don’t believe the intention was ever to create hierarchies on comment pages, I believe that is what’s happening. I say this because today I was posting to a blog, and the site designer had implemented Gravatars. If you had one, then you got a little picture by your post. If you didn’t have one, you got nothing, and straight away your comment appears less important than its Gravatised peers. I had given my name and my email address and yet I was being penalised because I didn’t have a colourful icon next to my comment.
So, what to do? Well, I have to get one. It’s not a considerable effort I admit, but if everyone else is doing it, what choice is there?