Automattic Buys And Integrates Gravatar Into WordPress.com

Automattic is a startup company that is best known for creating WordPress.  WordPress is an open source blogging platform that many of the major technology blogs use, including Pulse 2.0.  Matt Mullenweg of Automattic stated that he saw Gravatar evolve over the years and saw that Gravatar had great potential, but might have a problem to scale its service.  And scaling is one of Automattic’s strengths, so they acquired Gravatar. 

Over the past few days, Automattic has taken the code for Gravatar and transferred the Rails application into WordPress.com’s infrastructure.  Gravatar now works three times as fast.  Gravatar’s Premium features will become free and also combine the number of avatars that WordPress.com has with the avatars available on Gravatar.  WordPress.com has about a million avatars and Gravatar has about 115,000.  WordPress.com also made Gravatar avatars available at bigger sizes: from 80×80 to 128×128. 

Tom Werner is the creator of Gravatar.  Financial terms were undisclosed.

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