Public Profiles For Everyone
June 02, 2010 | Posted by Beau Lebens
Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:
As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!
People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.
We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:
- Profile pages are completely public, and accessible via nice short links, for example http://gravatar.com/beau (get your link from the bottom of your profile page)
- We’ve improved our support for translations, and are now looking for your help to get the Gravatar website translated into as many languages as possible
- foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)
- You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!
- That old profile editor of ours was way too ugly and hard to use, so we’ve made it easier to use and to see what’s going on (and to add more options, such as…)
- Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass as the background:
As always, if you don’t want any of your information to be public, then please just log into your account and go to “Edit My Profile” to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!
Developers; get your developer hats on because there are some especially cool things coming for you soon😉
joint
Very nice! But I’m having trouble updating my profile info. My links doesn’t save and I don’t know why.
Do you get an error or anything, or it’s just not saving? What are the links + titles you’re trying to save?
Just not save, like you don’t receive any feedback.
But I tried something and it seemed to work. I removed the accents of my links names.
“As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!”
Ummm…I guess some people haven’t learned anything from the various Facebook privacy debacles.
The default value of anything to do with privacy should be “private” until the user decides otherwise.
“The default value of anything to do with privacy should be “private” until the user decides otherwise.”
We agree, however Gravatar has always been about open identity, used all over the web (specifically *not* just a private place to share information, as Facebook used to be). Nothing in Gravatar has ever been closed and users have never had an option to explicitly make something private. We’re not suddenly exposing a lot of personal details that used to be private; the only reason to enter information in Gravatar is if you want it to be open. If you’re not comfortable with that then definitely do not enter it in your Gravatar account.
Thanks Beau,
I get it, that was what I understood all along. Now, as to facebook – that was supposed to be just friends….
Why can’t I add my homepage as contact information? Where do the links come from that I see on the name of other commenters? I can’t find a way to set my url.
The links displayed here in the comments section are entered when you post a comment (in the URL field), they aren’t loaded from your global profile (yet!). What link are you trying to add to your profile? Are you getting an error?
I have a link added on my profile, a link to my homepage. When I look at Edit Public Profile → Your Links, it is there. It just doesn’t appear on my public profile.
Oh, I just noticed I can add links in the “About You” text. I put my homepage in there, and removed it from “Your Links”.
Nice, thanks. As you asked to suggest missing sites, here is some that I use: Google Profile, Picasa, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Dopplr, Qik, aNobii, Plancast.
I’d like to see Qik and Plancast added.
Thanks, but no thanks. I wasn’t really looking for yet another public profile to have to manage, but alas you’ve forced me into it. Back when Gravatar was just ‘dumb pipes’ for my avatar I had a great appreciation for your service, now, not that impressed.
Feel free to just not enter any information in your public profile Jonathan, it’s definitely not required in any way to maintain your Gravatar. If you remove any details from there, we’ll just get a blank page on your profile.
Sites to add: Google Profile, Delicious, Last.fm, and Gowalla.
Yup, you can’t have Foursquare but ignore Gowalla — so please add it…!
Does this have all the rel=”me” stuff to make the social graph walkers work?
Yes, yes it does
The profile pages are fully marked up in hCard microformats, and include the re=”me” XFN data where appropriate. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know!
[…] Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you've had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let's open things up. It's been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it's time to do what we've been really excited to do since we first announced profiles: As of right now, … Read More […]
nice work beau and gang. now to figure out how this can actually be useful to me on the day to day. look forward to what kind of buzz and innovation this creates.
Love the WordPress integration. One problem. I purchased a domain name from WordPress but my Gravatar profile is stuck on the “wordpress.com” URL for my Verified site. There’s no way to add new WordPress blogs (if you’re integrated why isn’t it on the list?)
This is some bad joss. What if someone has multiple WordPress blogs?
We’re currently only supporting one of each service (WordPress included), so you’d need to remove your other one and then add your new URL to do that. We’re looking at possibly offering more than one for each service in the future.
You may want to add a note in the UI then, because it looks like I can ONLY remove WordPress and not add it. I was afraid to do that because I assumed I couldn’t be able to add another one back in.
[…] Gravatar profiles are now live. The fun thing about these are that they look handy, every linked service is verified, they’re as easy to link as Gravatars (hash of email), and they’re as open as Gravatar, meaning that with the email hash you can get all information someone has made public, in any format you like. ¶ « Dan Ariely […]
[…] profil sayları servisine başladı. (İng. resmi detaylar […]
Nice work! But where does it generate our short link? Can I change that?
Your URL is based on your username, which cannot currently be changed. If you want a different one, you’ll need to create a new account and move all your details over there.
[…] ayer los perfiles de Gravatar son públicos, es decir, que a menos que especifiques en las opciones de tu cuenta que quieres mantenerlo […]
A logical next step would be to have the URL of the public profile available through the API.
Full APIs are coming very shortly.
Great job guys. Just updated my profile information (the site works fine in Mobile Safari on the iPad).
Suggested services to add: Gowalla, Flickr, Vimeo
Ignore my vim and Flickr requests. I see they are already there.
This is exciting. I’d like to be able to change my public URL though. I use “evensr” as my username and emailadress all over the web, but right now the url ends with even90.
Unfortunately we can’t change usernames right now, so you’d need to create a new account and move all your details over there to do that.
Great stuff, I think they make an option to add links to the comments you made from other blogs out there. Although that would be a big task. You’d have to grab WP blog comments RSS feeds that use Gravatar and then search out that user. I know I’ve seen a site do something similar for all the top sites out there but based it on the person’s URL they put in comments.
[…] private, you can set it in “Edit Profile” section, and remove the details. Have a try, click here to visit the publication page. Share and […]
I can’t get rid of the default gravatar image. http://en.gravatar.com/alt255
how do I delete it?
The main image is the Gravatar assigned to your primary address: it looks like yours is not rated “G”, so it’s not showing up. You can change that by hovering over the image on your Manage My Gravatars page and then clicking the Rating link.
Is it possible to change the custom link for your profile?
Not currently, no. You would need to create a new account with the username you want, then move all your details over to that account.
That’s kinda lame.
Alright.
That’s a pity, especially considering you can’t delete your gravatar account, I assume you’d have to make a new username and have a new linking email address?
Yes, you can create a new account using a different username, and then shuffle your Primary Address off your current account and onto the new one.
Could you add LibraryThing?
+1 for librarything
Hi , I would like to ask that can we mention our website URL
If your website is powered by WordPress, then you can verify it under the Verified Services section. If not, then you can add it just as a “Your Links” and it will appear with a screenshot.
This is superb stuff; I’m quite pleased! Well, except for one teeeensy thing. It’d be swell to have more than one WordPress verified account. I have both a personal and a professional WordPress blog, and I’d love to hook them both up.
[…] Public Profiles For Everyone Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. […] […]
[…] enlazar como oficiales (si quieren que se incluyan otros, pueden pedirlos en los comentarios del post oficial)Ya no hay límite de 140 caracteres para escribir la bio (¡por suerte!)Editor de perfil más […]
[…] Adición de Foursquare y TripIt a los servicios que podemos enlazar como oficiales (si quieren que se incluyan otros, pueden pedirlos en los comentarios del post oficial) […]
Gravatar might be good to be used for english websites, but it sucks in connection-speed on international websites. Also you guys did not even manage to translate this service into other languages than english.
Erich, we need to link them all up, but there are some partially-translated versions of the site already (e.g. http://fr.gravatar.com/ ) which you will be automatically directed to if you browser indicates that as a language preference. We’re also working on more translations over here: http://blog.gravatar.com/2010/05/31/gravatar-localization/
Is it possible to pull in the profile information from someone’s Gravatar page into an Author Profile page in WordPress? I know how to display the bio information from one’s profile within WordPress on an author page, but since the photo comes in from Gravatar, it makes sense to pull in the profile information stored on Gravatar as well. I’m just not sure how to do that.
Hi Tom — we’ve got some new stuff coming out very soon that will allow you to do this very easily😉
Beau, is it now possible to pull in a gravatar profile? I want to show the description, email, and other profile info from a person’s gravatar.
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re asking Tom, but you can request profile data as detailed in the Developer Docs here: http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/profiles/
[…] Profiles Just wondering how many of you have taken advantage of the new Gravatar profiles? http://blog.gravatar.com/2010/06/02/…-for-everyone/ I just recently went in and configured mine for WPTavern. Check it out and look how big the beer […]
Add one vote for a last.fm connection!
[…] Adición de Foursquare y TripIt a los servicios que podemos enlazar como oficiales (si quieren que se incluyan otros, pueden pedirlos en los comentarios del post oficial) […]
Is it possible to be on gravatar.com – logged in or not – and just do random (or specific) profile searches? Since our profiles are public, I thought we could, but I don’t see where.
There is not currently a way to do this (lookups are by email only, and there’s no “assisted” way of doing that either). There are no immediate plans to do this, but we might at some point in the future.
Great! Still, I consider it crucial to be able to modify the profile URL. Will that be possible in the future?
[…] Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you've had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let's open things up. It's been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it's time to do what we've been really excited to do since we first announced profiles: As of right now, … Read More […]
[…] You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself. (Official Gravatar Blog) […]
[…] Gravatar rolled out for June 2010 Public Profiles, so there is a lot of development to come with the system. Also, a lot of websites have Gravatar enabled. If your site is not, but you would like to put it in your comment system, you can. Regardless of what system you use, there is a great Developer’s Resource section at Gravatar, including directions for Using Gravatar in WordPress. […]
[…] the concept one step further, last week WordPress announced Gravatar Public Profiles. Now you can fill out a complete profile including links to select social media accounts, and even […]
[…] Profile page is easy to maintain. You can find a list of features on Gravatar blog. However, layout looks simple and clean. Personally I liked […]
Just another vote for adding Delicious to the list of verified services. Thanks!
I would love to be able to use a custom URL with my public Gravatar profile. Currently I’m doing a domain forwarding trick that isn’t all that awesome.
I’d like to see deviantART in the list of supported “services”.
icon set for websites like say twitter, friendfeed etc should be original, the ones that are available now look fake i mean they don’t look good
Devian art is definitely great
Awesome thing. But this is still missing some important (at last for me) features like adding multiple verified services, moving personal links from main window to sidebar, adding custom and multiple contact info, something like displaying rss feeds from multiple sources (like blog, photoblog, microblog, flickr and others). Everything with fluid and configurable widget-based layout.
Gravatar should become something like a internet id that gathers links to all places one is active on and his recent activity. But not in friendfeed way. Good example of what I’m writing about is storytlr. You can see how it’s working on Fred Gallagher contrails page (http://contrails.fredart.com/).
I add one more vote to support deviant into one of the supported service. You can get some cool icons from Deviant.
An interesting service, which can be developed surely still further.
Why do you ask for too much permission on Flickr?
” By authorizing this link, you’ll allow Gravatar to:
Access your Flickr account (including private content)
Upload, Edit, and Replace photos and videos in your account
Interact with other members’ photos and videos (comment, add notes, favorite) ”
Read access (but not to private), I can understand, and would approve – but this is too much.
We ask for this because at some point we’d love to be able to update your profile/picture in other places (with your permission of course), and didn’t want to have to make people go through the authorization process again.
I second Stephanie and add one more vote…
how do i know if my gravatar is public?
Everything entered on Gravatar.com (except your email addresses configured within the “Manage My Gravatars” page) is openly-accessible, that’s kind of the point of Gravatar
[…] Gravatar recently launched Hovercards, a new feature that servers as a nifty bridge between your Gravatar and your Gravatar Profile. […]
Launching yet another social network? How about public walls and other nitty-gritty stuff?
Is there a way to search for others gravatar profile via their email address or any means for that matter. I would love to have the option (maybe a WP plugin idea?) that allowed me to put a guest author’s gravatar image and maybe even their little self bio at the end of their post. Especially if this is a one time guest post, no need to create an account on WP for that.
There’s no way to do this on the website currently, but if you know their email address then you can just md5-hash it and then request their profile directly (http://gravatar.com/HASH).
Hi Beau,
How do I change my primary email address? I want to change from yahoo to gmail as my primary.
You will need to add the new address to your account, make the new one your Primary, then you can delete your previous Primary address (you can’t delete an address while it’s set as the primary).
I have verified 6 of the services listed with Gravatar. None of those sites has an option to use a URL or connect to Gravatar (Facebook and Twitter for example).
Why are these services listed as verifiable services if I can’t use Gravatar on them?
You are just verifying that these external profiles are indeed yours so that they can be listed on your profile page. This is intended to make sure that people don’t list fake details on their account, that is all.