Automattic acquired Gravatar

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

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

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