Category Archives: Websites

Automattic Acquires Gravatar

Blogging, Internet, Websites

The ever popular blogging service Gravatar started by Tom Werner has been acquired by Automattic.

For those that aren’t aware what a gravatar is, it’s a globally recognised avatar. I can hear the question already, what is an avatar and stop speaking Greek. An avatar is a little image or animated icon that people often have displayed beside their names in online forums. A gravatar is generally meant to unique to a user and is used with the intention that it’s easier of recognise a user by glancing at an image rather than by having to read their name.

Automattic acquiring Gravatar is an excellent move for the community in my opinion. In the last year or so, the Gravatar service has been failing after having a solid adoption rate throughout the blogging community. It was a vicious cycle really, as the more exposure they received the more users signed up and the more the service struggled to manage that load. The Automattic crew have quite a bit of experience scaling web sites and services out, after successfully delivering services such as Akismet for fighting spam and the massively popular hosted WordPress.com blogging platform.

A quick message by the founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, points out that since migrating the services into the Automattic infrastructure, that it’s already three times faster. It seems they’ve got some pretty cool plans for the Gravatar service in the future as well:

  • Rewrite the service in PHP, the programming language of choice for Automattic
  • Move the image delivery into a Content Delivery Network, reduces their load and lowers end user latency as well
  • Push the 1,000,000 plus avatars currently in WordPress.com into the Gravatar platform so they are available everywhere
  • Integrate the newly rebuilt Gravatar services back into WordPress.com
  • Implement cleaner URL’s for each gravatar

There are a bunch of other features that are coming but those are the ones that I thought were most interesting. Congratulations has to go to Tom Werner for developing a great specialist product to start with that was worth an acquisition. I’m excited to see how that all unfolds now under the management and guidance of the Automattic team.

Social Networking Done Right?

Internet, Websites

Since joining Facebook, I have been amazed at how well it facilitates social networking.

I’m not sure why I’m so impressed with Facebook, it is a social networking tool after all. I suppose it has to do with my constant comparison against the other monster social networking sites on the internet such as MySpace.

In the case of MySpace, I signed up to that to claim my account – I had no real intention of using it as a long term service. Even after claiming my account, I didn’t see a lot of activity on it and its cluttered and often disorganised interface annoyed me.

I signed up to Facebook for similar reasons, to claim my account but primarily to check out what all the fuss was about. Soon after signing up, I was astonished at how many people I knew in another life are popping back up – it is fantastic!

I’m not a big social networking user but if what Facebook are doing is doing social networking right; then I am beginning to appreciate just how tremendous it can be.

Google Webmasters Facelift

Internet, Websites

The development team behind Google Webmasters have been at it again, releasing a new interface and additional features to the much loved utility.

Some points of interest about this particular update:

  • The landing page for Google Webmasters has been updated with a nicer layout and some groovy little icon action; all of the familiar links and utilities are still present on the page.
  • The user interface within the Webmasters Console has been refreshed, with stacked left navigation similar to what Google Analytics provides. At this stage, the overall bling throughout Google Webmasters doesn’t compare to Google Analytics; however it is great to see that they are making improvements to the interface regardless.
  • Subscriber statistics have been added in, so it is now possible to see how many people subscribe to the various XML feeds that your site provides. While it is quite useful to see a raw number, it would be nice to see more information about that data such as how it is trending over time, how often people are checking it and so forth. I had expected that Google would have already started exposing services provided by the recently acquired Feedburner, which would provide that level of granularity and more – maybe this is the start of that movement?

I don’t recall if the user interface had this before or not, however each section in the stacked navigation now features an overview page. Frustratingly, the overview page doesn’t actually ‘overview’ anything but provide a link into each section within it (which are already in the menu itself); so in effect you get a link and a tiny blurb per sub-section.

Nothing earth shattering in this particular release, however the constant improvement of the Google utilities is on of the things that makes them so good. I can’t wait for the next update, where I’m sure we’ll see a vastly improved user interface with better data visibility across the board.

Nothing Like Spam To Lower Your Opinion Of A Site

Advertising, Photos, Search, Websites

Squidoo spam, regarding cat urine removers.Last year, Seth Godin launched a new service named Squidoo, which aimed to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo has been gaining reasonable momentum since it launched and as a result, it has now become the next haven for spammers.

I appreciate that it might be difficult to manage the problem, however if a site like Squidoo can’t get it under control then it completely erodes the usefulness of the site in my opinion. The Squidoo spam problem has been happening for quite some time and the owners are aware of it, however it seems that they have yet to find a way to curb it.

It’s a shame really, as I hate spam so much that it has now tainted my opinion of Squidoo as a useful service. Fortunately, I find the site pretty much useless, so at least I don’t have to put up with it while browsing their site.

Helpful Domain Utilities

Internet, Websites

It used to be quite cumbersome and slow to perform domain research, then the domain registers became a whole lot smarter by providing you with a list of alternative ‘suggested’ domains. While the suggestions that the domain registers were suggesting were at times useful, more often than not they were utterly useless and weren’t worth the money to purchase.

Some time ago I stumbled across Domains Bot, which is an AJAX enabled domain search utility. You enter the name of the domain that you’d like to use and it comes back with an AJAX dropdown list with information on whether the domain is available or if it is for sale on one of the big domain clearing houses.

Yesterday, I followed a link into Bust A Name, which is a similar service with a twist. This time around you enter in a bunch of key words or phrases that you’d like in the domain and it goes away and tries to find all of the domains within your suggested list that are available; drastically cutting down research time.

Next time you’re looking to buy a domain, give one of these utilities a go; I’ve found them very useful.