RIP: Gravatar

I already wondered last night why I’ve received errors from the Gravatar-Plugin, but was too tired to put some effort into troubleshooting. As reported by Fred and Ralf, the nice avatar image service of Gravatar.com is down.

There are many possibilities that could explain what is happening with Gravatar. However, what is sure is that Tom Werner forgot, intentionally or not, to renew the domain name.

This is a sad story considering that thousands of web sites were using this beautiful little service. Many web site developers were relying on the service, and he fell apart. The problem with this type of service is that it needs to be centralized somewhere. Then when such a service stop to exist, everyone that where using it have nothing to rely on anymore.

However, Fred offered he’d try his best to put the Gravatar service back on line… perhaps the Gravatar won’t rest in peace yet!