WordPress 母公司 Automattic 收购 Gravatar

WordPress 的母公司 Automattic 收购了 Gravatar，这个提供头像服务的互联网公司。头像服务对于 WordPress 用户并不陌生，很多博客使用了 Gravatar 的这项服务，使用之后，每个评论的作者的头像都会显示在评论旁边。

使用头像服务，博客作者很容易知道哪些网友在自己的博客上留言；留言者可以通过这种方式来宣传自己。因此，当头像服务出现的时候，立即受到了很多博客的喜爱。除了 Gravatar 之外，MyBloglog 等其他互联网公司也开始提供这一服务。

WordPress 的母公司 Automattic 这次收购 Gravatar，将会更加坚定很多 WordPress 用户使用 Gravatar 的决心。在这次收购之后，Gravatar 运行速度比以前快了三倍；收购之后，Gravatar 还有如下改进计划：

• We’re going to make all of the Premium features free, and refund anyone who bought them in the last 60 days.
• Move the gravatar serving to a Content Delivery Network so not only will they be fast, it’ll be low latency and not slow down a page load.
• Take the million or so avatars we have on WordPress.com and make them available through the Gravatar API, to compliment the 115k already here.
• From Gravatar, integrate them into all WordPress.com templates and bring features like multiple avatars over.
• From WordPress.com, bring the bigger sizes (128px) over and make that available for any Gravatar. Currently Gravatars are only available up to 80px.
• Allow Gravatar profile pages with Microformat support for things like XFN rel="me" and hCard.
• Develop a new API that has cleaner URLs and allows Gravatars to be addressed by things like URL in addition to (or instead of) email addresses.
• Rewrite the application itself (site.gravatar.com) to fit directly into our WordPress.com grid, for internet-scale performance and reliability.