Do you know someone who is bad with names but good with faces? Or maybe you’re one of those people?
If the answer is “No” on both accounts, well, let me introduce myself. My name is Loni. I remember faces, not names.
Google is amazing. They have connected so many different services, your profile (and its picture) is available through several venues without any effort on your part. The result is you have a nice little picture when you comment on a Blogger blog.
But what if you’re not commenting on a Blogger blog? What if it’s WordPress? Or Typepad? Depending on the platform and settings, your avatar may vary. It might be a fractal design, or it might be something else.
There is a service called Gravatar that is designed to help out. The Globally Recognized Avatar identifies your email address and populates the generic avatar with your image of choice. Now people like me, who recognize faces and not names, can have that extra little helper to build relationships and connections online. And isn’t that what we all want? To connect?
I hope I see your face around here more often!
I’m one of those people, too. See you once, and I’ll remember your face till I die. Ask me to call your name, though… 😛
Great post. Glad you’re sharing about Gravitar. I’ve already signed up, but I didn’t know about it for quite a while.
Gravatar was one of those things that I had to go searching for myself. I’d always wondered how some people had pictures while mine didn’t.
Oh dear. I’m one of those unlucky people who are terrible with faces AND names. I dread meeting people I haven’t seen in years, because it’s guaranteed that I won’t have any idea who they are, or how I know them, and it’s soooo awful. I feel terrible! I wish Gravatar had an app for day to day life, so we could all walk around with name and pictures badges, LOL!
A real-life app would be great! I wonder if Google Glass can do that?
Oh and I just signed up for Gravatar – thanks for the tip!!
Great to see your face!
See, the problem is the WP system won’t let me link my blog or choose the user name I want to display. Guess I’ll just have to mention cheese every time I stop by, eh? 😉
When I see cheese, I think of you. 🙂
Don’t we all, and I’m trying to cut back on cheese due to high cholesterol…argh
Never mind. Guess it worked! (Ahem, can you delete the duplicate comment?)
Done! And glad to see that it worked!
I have so much trouble with the names too.
I tried several times to create a gravatar and have had little luck.
I will give it another shot…
That’s interesting, because I see your picture there. Maybe it did work?
Huh, I had no idea that’s what that was. Cool! Will have to check it out. And that’s me too, knowing faces but spacing the name. =/
One time, I was stuck on a guy’s name. I was trying to tell someone else about him and the only thing I could think of was, “His name starts with ‘J’.” Yeah, the guy’s name was Jay. *facepalm*
Ha ha…what a nice way to remind your readers to get a Gravatar! I can completely identify with you, Loni.
Plus it’s great to see smiling faces.
Thanks for stopping by!
I quite liked the way you presented gravatar! Visual memory is in fact more powerful
Richa
It certainly helps me!
This is fascinating. I personally don’t want my email, my facebook, my twitter, my blogs all connected so purposely have chosen to say as far away from google+ as I can AND because I so dislike the google profile page mess; but it’s interesting to learn the avatar is connected with your email. That brings up another question…many of us with multiple blogs have multiple emails, perhaps due to when the blog was started etc, so doesn’t that make things kinda messy? I’m with ya on remembering faces though, years ago on a forum where I was quite active I remembered everyone’s avatar, and no one used real names……then they all joined facebook and I had no idea who they were. So then can a person make a gravatar to use that’s not connected with google+etc? I’m purposely hitting different blog posts of yours top spread out the comments, plus then I get to see a different post you made…win win.
to spread, not top spread, sorry. Also just noticed Crystal’s comment…do does that mean no one can leave a hyper link here?
Testing
Sandy at Traveling Suitcase
so if this works there should be 2 different links, one as a hyperlink to one post and the other in the fill in area…website spot to yet another post. Maybe if we all put our heads together we can figure out all these different little things from one platform to another.
It worked! It may be a difference of WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.org sites too. Since I have a WordPress.com account, I haven’t paid much attention to the limited options. My site is self-hosted with WordPress.org as the framework. I’ll go hunt down my WordPress.com buddies and see what the options are with their sites.