Gravatar Introduces Profiles-as-a-Service and a new REST API

Ronnie Burt, writing on the Gravatar blog:

For two decades, Gravatar has been an unsung hero of the internet, quietly powering billions of avatars across websites like Slack, OpenAI, Atlassian, and more. Today, we are excited to introduce the latest addition to the Gravatar suite of tools: our new REST API. We redesigned the new API from the ground up to make it simpler and more efficient for developers to integrate Gravatar’s globally recognized avatars and profile data into their apps and websites.

and

We’re moving beyond the humble avatar and aiming to be the open platform of choice for publicly sharing all kinds of profile data — bios, interests, preferences, work history, social connections, and more.

Gravatar, owned by Automattic, has been delivering user avatars to websites and apps for a long time now. This new offering seems like a fantastic idea, and I wish more sites and apps start adopting their new API. At least IFTTT should, but may be also Mastodon?

Here’s my new Gravatar page: https://gravatar.com/preshit

June 11, 2024 ✚ Permalink

Twitter Auto-Sharing Feature Discontinued in Jetpack WordPress Plugin

Kristina P, writing on the official Jetpack blog, in a post titled “The End of Twitter Auto-Sharing”:

Twitter decided, on short notice, to dramatically change the terms and pricing of the Twitter API. We have attempted to work with Twitter in good faith to negotiate new terms, but we have not been able to reach an agreement. As a result, the Twitter connection on Jetpack Social will cease to work, and your blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter.

This was bound to happen, and we’ll be seeing many more such announcements in the coming days.

May 2, 2023 ✚ Permalink

Pocket Casts Mobile Apps Go Open Source

Yael Rubinstein, writing on the Pocket Casts blog:

We’ve been eager to take this step since we joined Automattic last year — after all, the company’s creed includes the phrase “I know that open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.” We believe that podcasting can not and should not be controlled by Apple and Spotify, and instead support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients.

It was just a matter of time when this would happen, as anyone who knows Automattic knows their love for open source. The only surprising thing to me is that Pocket Casts is only making their mobile apps open source, the Desktop and Web versions are not included in this anouncement and the company says it has no plans to do so either.

This announcement has generally been received positively by users and developers of other podcasts apps.

The iOS repository as well as the Android repository are up on GitHub with a Mozilla Public License 2.0.

October 21, 2022 ✚ Permalink

Automattic Raises $300 million in Series D

Matt Mullenweg, writing on his personal blog about Automattic’s latest Series D round from Salesforce Ventures at a $3 billion valuation.

For Automattic, the funding will allow us to accelerate our roadmap (perhaps by double) and scale up our existing products—including WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and (in a few days when it closes) Tumblr. It will also allow us to increase investing our time and energy into the future of the open source WordPress and Gutenberg.

Automattic has long been one of my most revered companies on the internet. The way WordPress has evolved over the years, complimented by products like Jetpack and VaultPress, it truly remarkable.

And so, I’ve been very excited to see what the Automattic team does with its Tumblr acquisition. Tumblr was known to have phenomenal potential back in the day, and with the right team running it now, I long to see where the product goes. At the bare minimum, I hope Tumblr can act as an alternative or replacement to Instagram, which Facebook has already ruined with too many ads.

September 19, 2019 ✚ Permalink

WordPress Celebrates its 15th Anniversary Today

15 Years of WordPress

On May 27, 2003 — exactly fifteen years ago today, the first version of WordPress was made available for download. Unlike most software releases that start at v1.0, this was Version 0.7 of WordPress that was being released as the first non-beta.

What began as a fork of b2/cafelog over 15 years ago has today turned into a robust, reliable and popular Content Management System that powers close to 30% of the world’s top 10 million websites.

WordPress holds a very special place in my life and I’ve been building websites powered by WordPress since 2006. Although I’m not a fan of the clunky mess that WordPress is turning into, I still love building with WordPress and couldn’t be more excited about the years to come.

May 27, 2018 ✚ Permalink