The avatar service Gravatar was acquired by our company Automattic today.
What is a gravatar?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?
Overall it’s a real good fit for us, and I’m excited about our future plans. More details here.
Some helpful ( and fun ) OS X apps that I’ve been using recently:
– id Software released HD footage of Rage (trailer & developer walk-through), the new internally developed game, at QuakeCon 2007 (Shacknews coverage). It’s in WMV format, so if you are on a Mac and not running some kind of virtualization/windows combo, you should grab the WMV Quicktime component. While I haven’t played PC games in years, this one is looking pretty solid.
– Using Google Analytics to track your site’s traffic and running OS X ? Dashalytics is a new OS X widget that shows a snapshot from your Google Analytics account in your OS X Dashboard. On the subject of traffic stats, if you are running WordPress, make sure to check out our WordPress.com Stats plugin.
– Must be something about playing Tetris for hours on end back in the day (aka “Tetris Effect“) that caused me to seek out Tetris clones. A really good one that a few people have emailed me about (and just saw that Jamie wrote about recently) is called Quinn. Really clean interface, and even includes “extensive online highscore database” 🙂 Definitely worth checking out.
– (UPDATE #1) Forgot to also mention the excellent OS X port of Open Office called NeoOffice. It even handles MS Word tracking changes which is something Google Docs does not currently support. (thanks Matt for the tip)
The crew from WallStrip (now part of CBS) was in San Francisco and interviewed the CEO of Automattic, Toni Schneider, on “the best and worst parts of Web 2.0.”
Make sure to watch until the end of the long/short segment for a WallStrip first !
A quick wrap-up of this past week which included a few “firsts”:
– My first WordCamp this past weekend — quite amazing. Great to see this very active WordPress community coming together to share ideas and meet up in person. If you take a look at the WordCamp schedule page, you will see pingbacks to lots of great coverage like Barry’s ‘high performance WordPress” presentation. In addition, there are a ton of photos of the event on flickr, and Brian Oberkirch has a nice WordCamp round-up.
– Stinson beach. In a word “wow”. I’ve been up here once before for a quick lunch, but spending a few days here has really solidified this place as gem in my mind. Even managed to boogieboard/bodyboard for the first time !
– Wii. I had played the boxing and golf game briefly while at CES last year. But @ our off-site this week we’ve had it hooked up to a projector and loaded with sports game, notably tennis. As a somewhat old school gamer I really loved the change of pace with the Wii. It’s simple, fun, and way more social than most other console games.
– Trapped in the Closet. A must see hip-hopera 🙂 What was great, and a first this week, was watching it followed by “Trapped in a Drive Through“.
Joseph Scott just posted on WordPress.com that the new facebook app is ready to go.
Blogs are one of the ways the Internet has fostered greater communication among people than ever before. Social network sites like Facebook provide a more structured way to keep up with specific people. Wouldn’t it be great if you could mix the two?
With the new WordPress.com Facebook App you can do exactly that.
Definitely go check it out.
I wrapped up at Dow Jones Online last week, and today is my first official day at Automattic !
I just want to say thanks to Dow Jones. It’s been an incredibly rewarding time working at Dow Jones Online, and I’m tremendously proud of all that we accomplished from the various search initiatives, allthingsD.com, to all things multiplatform with mobile, RSS, and widgets.
Dow Jones is truly an amazing company, and it was great to be in the presence of colleagues who were incredibly hard working and dedicated to their work.
For those who may not know, Automattic is a remarkable company. The team is smart, passionate, and well respected. How we work is probably a bit different than most companies, and the incredible growth of one of our core offerings — wordpress.com, is impressive 🙂
As a WordPress user from the pre 1.0 days, ( Ver .71 or .72 is when I started following the progress closely ), I’m very exited to be working with Matt, Toni, Barry, and the team.
In July, I’ll be attending WordCamp 2007, so hope to see many of you there. Feel free to drop me a line if you plan to attend.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 