Automattic is a startup company that is best known for creating WordPress. WordPress is an open source blogging platform that powers many websites. The financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.
Matt Mullenweg of Automattic stated that he saw Gravatar evolve over the years and saw that it 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.
Gravatar was founded by Tom Werner.
