Automattic acquired Gravatar

Automattic, the company behind the development of the WordPress blog engine, the Akismet spam filter and the WordPress.com blog hosting service, acquired Gravatar , which allows you to use a single avatar on blogs, linking it to an email address. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

Now Gravatar provides all Premium functions for free (paid for a paid account less than two months ago, the money will be refunded), the service “rotates” on WordPress.com servers and works three times faster. As for future changes, a series of the following innovations is coming:

• Rewriting the service to increase performance;
• Switching to the content distribution network and, as a result, reducing the waiting time without slowing down the page load;
• Providing Gravatar API access to more than a million avatars located on WordPress.com ... this is in addition to the 115 thousand already available;
• Increase the maximum avatar size from 80 pixels to 128;
  Support for Gravatar profile microformats such as XFN rel = "me" and hCard;
• Development of a new API with “clean” URLs, with an avatar binding not only to the e-mail, but also to the site address;
• Service integration with the WordPress.com interface.