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?
To my mind, this is another Internet equivalent of those casual jackets with the big shoulder-pads which were all the rage in the 80s. Yes, everyone had one at the time, but twenty years later…
So you think there will be a lot of gravatars donated to the local Goodwill store someday in the future?
Hmmm… I am big fan of Gravatars and not a big fan of fads. Some sites do actually implement a default Gravatar if you can’t be bothered to take the 5 or 10 minutes to get one. I find them incredibly useful for identifying people on my own blog and on other blogs.
Overly precious designers are always going to feel a bit funny about their glorious designs being destroyed by someone’s ‘sub-standard’ Gravtar… *yawn!* Like I say Gravtars are simply about putting a ‘face’ to a name for me… take it or leave, remain faceless, it’s your choice!
Does that mean you’ll be getting a LiveJournal account too, Paul?
I just clicked on the gravatars.com link and noted the ‘random gravatars’ helpfully shown for me: two unflattering photos of sweaty, spiky-haired men; what appeared to be a crudely animated, vaguely anthropomorphic piece of toast; a poorly-scanned image presumably taken of someone as a child; and a ‘get firefox’ logo. Oh for f*ck’s sake.
Phwoar, eh?
“Overly precious designers are always going to feel a bit funny about their glorious designs being destroyed by someone’s ‘sub-standard’ Gravtar”
I think that’s fair enough, though. If someone has spent a lot of time on their site design, I can understand why they might prefer to maintain what they see as a certain standard throughout.
They were of interest at first, I thought, because they represented a small design challange; make a square image that looks as good at 80×80 as it does at, say, 32×32, or perhaps 16×16. Early adopters went away and tinkered in Photoshop and made nice little images with butterflies and drop shadows and the like. But as more people use them, the quality will drop and eventually those who have implemented them on their site will cull them on their next redesign. I reckon, anyway.
You realise I have to get one now too, don’t you?
To hate on commentor’s with, shall we say, less pleasing gravatars, and saying that those images sully the quality of a weblog is akin to saying that ugly people who converse with you lessen your own stellar beauty. I created gravatars to humanize the weblog community and to increase the usability of comments. It doesn’t really matter what a person’s gravatar looks like, it’s mere existence gives you a way to better remember a person and their comment. Skipping over comments without an avatar attached is purely a personal problem, not a systemic fault in gravatars. Gravatars are not a fad. People truly find them useful, and I expect you’ll be sad to hear, they’re going to be around awhile.
I never said I hated commentators who have ugly Gravatars, nor was I attacking the Gravatar system; my point was that the way some webmasters implement the system can lead to a hierarchy, whether intentionally or not. A comment without a Gravatar on a website where the system is enabled can slip into the background very easily, in the same way as a greyed-out comment on Mezzoblue can.
“Saying that those images sully the quality of a weblog is akin to saying that ugly people who converse with you lessen your own stellar beauty.”
Sorry, but I don’t agree with the analogy; I’d liken it more to displaying a painting and then somebody coming along and scribbling on bits of it with a pen, but it’s beside the point anyway. I think there will come a stage where the novelty wears off and people do decide to remove the system from their websites. Time will tell, of course.
I’d thought a gravatar must be either
1) a kid’s toy, or
2) a dense astronomical object formed of degenerate matter, possessing an intense gravitational field. Magnetic objects of this type are, in fact, known as ‘magnetars’.
I guess I know better now. But I still don’t have one.
or 3) a gravelly-voiced Pat Benatar, perhaps?
At the risk of turning this into an Internet version of Call My Bluff: a gravatar is another name for a particularly ornate cemetery headstone.
Well, at least that explains why some people are dying to get one.
‘Gravatar’ is also a particularly unpleasant, bituminous version of gravadlax. That was done in my best Frank Muir voice, incidentally, which I guess would make it “gwavatar”.
Gravatars
Globally recognised annoyances. 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. by “Joe Blade” read more…
I think they are a fashion statement and will eventually dissepear.
gravitas
I think gravatars are only slightly less annoying than animated emoticons for blog noise, but I could be wrong. Although fears that it creates a heirarchy in the comments are possibly groundless as pretty soon everyone’s colourful stamp will be…
Well, it looks like Gravatar “forgot” to renew their domain. Now instead of the annoying Gravatars, there are a lot of annoying boxes with red “x”s. The Gravatar site is now dark. What will we do now? ;)
Ah, they’ll be back…