Which itch does a gravatar scratch?

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+2 Q:

Which itch does a gravatar scratch?

This is a very serious question: I've seen lots of threads here about gravatars but I couldn't find and answer to this question: what computer identification/authentication (?) problem, if any, are gravatars supposed to solve?

Neither the Wikipedia entry nor the official website are very useful. The official website mentions a "globally unique" picture. Unique in what sense? As far as I can see it's only the hash that is unique: two persons can have two pictures looking very similar if not identical.

Note that this question is not about which problems do gravatars unarguably cause (like leaking 10% of the stackoverflow.com accounts email addresses like discussed here : "gravatars can leak email adresses" ) but about which authentication (?) problems, if any, are gravatars supposed to solve?

Is the goal just to have a cool/funny/cute icon and save bandwith by having it stored on a remote website or is there more to it, like serving a real authentication purpose which I'd be completely missing?

Note that I've got nothing against them and find them rather cool, but I'm just having a hard time figuring out what their purpose is and if I should care or not about them in the webapps I'm developping.

+3 A:

It's not a security thing. The purpose is just to give people pictures which (1) identify them easily in a discussion (barring very-unlikely collisions); (2) are persistent between sites; and (3) require no marginal effort whatsoever on the individual's part.

My impression is that they were written rather fast and for fun, and were way more successful than the creators anticipated - hence the bugs/issues. But I could be wrong about that.

Tom Smith 2010-01-28 23:56:53

Specifically, as an identification mechanism, I'm probably not going to remember 'OldEnthusiast' the next time I look at a blog's comments (if I even bother to look at the name). I might remember you as "the dude with the purple trim around the edges of his icon", though. If you had something more unique (say, an upside down smiley face, or a nuclear bomb, or a cute kitten, or even your face) the odds would be even better.

fennec 2010-01-29 00:10:23

+1 A:

I like them for their convenience. Along with OpenID and associated login methods, uploading a profile picture is just one less step I need to take when signing up to a new website.

Dean 2010-01-28 23:57:38

Although, if you have OpenID, you could use OpenID Attribute Exchange to get an avatar. That way, your users don't even need to reveal their e-mail address. (This is assuming, of course, that you don't need the address anyway for other purposes.)

Jörg W Mittag 2010-01-29 03:36:27

+2 A:

The Gravatar home page explains it quite succinctly:

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog.

Nick Higgs 2010-01-28 23:59:35

Yup it's a bit too succinct: I thought there may be more to it than that but wasn't sure hence my question here :)

Webinator 2010-01-29 00:01:35

Nope, nothing to it. It's literally just a big hashtable `{e-mail => image-uri}`.

Jörg W Mittag 2010-01-29 03:29:12

CPAN Search automatically looks for a gravatar associated with an author's cpan.org address, as you see in my author page. The website, however, doesn't have to include any features for me to upload or change a picture, and I can use the same picture for other services. I can simultaneously change all of them without visiting each site.

brian d foy 2010-04-01 09:07:25

ansaurus

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Which itch does a gravatar scratch?

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