In the beginning there was avatar. And the avatar was good. But in time it became hard to replicate over and over again across many different blogs and forums and MySpace and Facebook and LinkedIn and lord knows where else you people have been!
Like obedient servants, we did as asked; replicating avatars everywhere we went in a tedious process. Perhaps we picked a new one each time in some random fashion. We scoured the Internet for the latest inane GIFs linking to them and hoping the links stayed valid or pilfering them and uploading the files to Imageshack and the like.
Then, one fine day, the web gods smiled upon us and, taking forth the Book of Armaments, Chapter 
Two, verses Nine to Twenty-one, were inspired to produce the Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar). The Gravatar, unlike its red-neck cousin avatar, is not simply a hyperlinked image from anywhere. Rather, it is a service which uses your encrypted email address to correlate you to a specific image uploaded by you and hosted by Gravatar itself. Yes, it’s free. Any software that supports Gravatar can interface with it so that you never need specify an avatar again so long as you use that email address, buddy.
We’re not out of the Fire Swamp yet, Buttercup. You see, Gravatar images may not necessarily be unique. That is to say, there does not appear to be anything preventing the same image being used for 2 different accounts. The horror! If this is what you’re after, consider them groovy Wavatars, Identicons and the MonsterIDs. Say what?
| Wavatars |  |
| Identicons |  |
| MonsterIDs |  |
Based on your encrypted email address, these automatically generated ‘avatars’ can be considered unique. Each different service claims differing combinations in the billions. Wavatar, for example, notes that in excess of 55 billion different Wavatar icons are possible. The tradeoff? You have no control over what they look like. As Mom would say, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”
Here at the Untangled Web, we use Gravatars with Identicons as the fallback service. This means that if you have no Gravatar defined, an Identicon will be provided for you. Isn’t that sweet of us? Sign up for a Gravatar now or let us produce an Identicon for you. Then go ahead and comment. Give it a try…