Automattic acquires Gravatar to help with scaling

Automattic, the owner of the popular blogging platform WordPress, has announced they have purchased Gravator, a popular avator system used mainly in blog commenting.

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic's founder, announced the details of the deal on the Gravatar blog (now built on WordPress of course), saying that the decision to acquire the company stemmed from scalability issues they were dealing with. Gravatar allows users to keep the same 80x80 pixel image beside their name when they travel from blog to blog, so long as it supports the platform which the new version of WordPress does. Automattic saw this as the perfect fit since they have plenty of experience scaling, and saw a great opportunity with Gravatar believing it closely resembled what had been previously accomplished with Akismet, another one of their products, open API and its ability to be used with any platform.

Since buying the company, Automattic has also made all premium Gravatar plans free, and has noted that avatars are being served three times as fast. Refunds are available for those that had purchased the plans within the past 60 days. Look out for a new Gravatar API to be developed as well, plus get ready to see plenty of pretty pictures in blog comments soon!

Tags: api, blog, buinsess, comment, comments, gravatar, icon, matt-mullenweg, pixel, scale, wordpress