Automattic buys Gravatar

Nice to hear good projects get nice attention and some more lovin’. Matt announces that Gravatar has just been acquired by Automattic, same company behind WordPress.

Watching how Gravatar changed and evolved over the years I saw a service with great adoption and potential, but facing some classic problems of scale that successful sites are often lucky to run into. Scaling happens to be something my company, Automattic, is very good at, and as we started chatting with Tom Werner of Gravatar it became obvious there’s a lot of potential for combined forces, and I also saw a lot of parallels to Akismet, a product that does one thing, does it well, and has an open API so any platform can use it.So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic, and here we are. Here’s what we’ve done so far over the past few days:

* We transferred the Rails application and most of the avatar serving to our WordPress.com infrastructure and servers.
* Avatar serving is now more than three times as fast, and works every time.
* We moved this blog from Mephisto to WordPress. )

Lately, the Gravatar service has been a little slow, chokes page loads and leaves some PHP errors in the logs. A reason why I disabled it here in my blog. Now, with the same grid that powers Akismet, I’m sure Gravatar will work even better.

We’re now back rollin’ the global avatars again. Thanks to Automattic.