Show who you are with Gravatar Hovercards
You thought Gravatar Profiles were cool? Wait until you see them on your WordPress.com blog.
Today dawns a new era in Gravatar awesomeness: Gravatar Hovercards. It’s now easy to find out about who is behind your favorite comments simply by moving your mouse. This new feature is now enabled by default across WordPress.com.
What’s a Hovercard?
Gravatar Hovercards show information about a person: name, bio, pictures, and their contact info at other services they use on the web like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
As a commenter, Hovercards offer a great way to show your Internet presence and help people find your own blog. As a blogger, you can quickly check out who’s commenting on your blog, and have an easier time connecting with them.
How to use and see Hovercards
You can see other people’s Hovercards by moving your mouse over their Gravatar picture in comments on any WordPress.com blog, and after a moment the Hovercard will appear. The information shown is taken directly from the person’s Gravatar profile. The more info in the profile, the more we show in the Hovercard.
This can help you when moderating comments, as Hovercards will appear not only on blogs, but inside your blog dashboard as well.
If it’s not something you want for your blog, you can turn Hovercards off for your blog by going to Settings, Discussions, Avatars.
If you haven’t set up your Gravatar Profile yet, just log in to Gravatar.com using your WordPress.com username and password and fill out your details or read these instructions first. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account yet, you can sign up for Gravatar here.
- October 6, 2010
- Avatars, New Features, WordPress.com
WordPress.com News 
I really like these new hovercards. And I like it that we have the option of turning them on or off.
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Great, I never tire of seeing myself!
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“W e’ll be rolling out self-hosted support very soon, we can’t commit to a specific date just yet.”
> Do you mean as the social network share features and buttons that should have be available since one month and half now ? 🙂
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If you’re referring to the sharing options available on WordPress.com, then they’re already available for self-hosted WordPress 🙂 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sharedaddy/
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simply COOL
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Tried everything including totally disabling the hovercards and even deleting all my cookies to get the hovercards again – perfect 😆
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Good idea! ❤ WordPress
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I don’t mind the Hovercards, but there is a problem in that now people cannot simply click a Gravatar and pull up all the posts by that author. That feature has disappeared. Will this come back? Please help…Kelly
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Thanks for the feedback. We’re working on figuring out the best way to handle links in all the various places Gravatars can show up.
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Why are you refusing to post negative comments and concerns about privacy?
(People stuck in moderation can still talk to each other.)
► Hypocrites. ◄
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We’re open to criticism. Comments which ask questions pertaining to a specific blog or account, though, are better addressed through our support channels and have been forwarded there.
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Great! I couldn’t resist the temptation and I am commenting just to see how will my hovecard look like.
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There is a huge difference between this and snapshots, this is useful, it does not intervene if you don’t want it (it stays on the person image and not in a link), it reduces space in your theme so I’m very pleased how it helps my theme to be more minimalistic and so forth.. it is like the vote system, that now have a pop-up if you mouse over the blue “i” (This made me remove the vote widget).
The only problem I found and is not only in good upgrades like this, it’s the reader experience… It divides readers between those who like it and those who don’t… and someone can have prejudice with that if they turn it off (In my blog I remove the social widget with links for twitter/facebook and my description since my gravatar have all this now, the reader must pass his mouse in my gravatar if he wants to know me more)… I found a way to try to please both, giving a link to my gravatar but I will try to nudge readers to support this upgrade for a more minimalist way to see the web.
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Significant privacy concerns appear to be getting soft-pedaled here.
I, for example, was able to learn the names and locations of several individuals today by way of information about them made suddenly available via their Hovercards — persons who I am fairly confident never expected that to occur.
My confidence derives from the fact that I was in the same boat — information I had submitted to Gravatar.com that I did not expect to be available was, in fact made “public” without my realization (and without immediate remedy — the email login for that account is no longer functional, but the Gravatar/ WordPress account nonetheless remains in existence); it was information that a simple Google would lead someone directly to my IRL identity.
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When we first launched Gravatar profiles we did specifically state that anything you added to your profile would be made public. If you’d like to keep information private then please remove it from your profile.
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Doesn’t seem to be working well on my blog. Most of the time the mouseover does nothing, but some of the time it flickers for a bit. Only rarely does the hovercard come up. So far, it seems like a sloppy implementation, but maybe it works with Internet Exploder.
I’m viewing them with Firefox 3.6.10 on a Mac (OS X, version 10.6.4).
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10
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If nothing comes up and the card “un-tilts” then it means that email address is not the primary address on a Gravatar account (so there’s nothing to show). We may change that behavior in the future, but currently it just auto-closes.
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Brilliant!
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Love it! Thanks for the implementation of this nifty little online calling card.
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A good Idea !
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So good Features!
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GOOD!
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nice
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What a great new service – I love that WordPress is always striving to improve! Thank you!
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It would be even better if it automatically linked to the user’s blog. On MSN your profile showed with your comments and linked to your blog. I do like it though. Nice feature. I might be able to adjust to this new platform soon. I miss the photo albums on MSN though.
http://www.hopefuljo.wordpress.com
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Nice! Really interesting.
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Fantastic idea! Thanks for implementing
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I really love the Hovercards, but I clicked on ” Turn off Hovercards” and can’t turn them on again ;-(
View people’s profiles when you mouse over their Gravatars under Settings, Discussions, Avatars is still selected.
Thank you.
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There are some instructions on how to re-enable them here: https://wordpress.com/support/gravatar-hovercards/
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It’s nice to see that WordPress has included hover cards. It seems that there is something new every day that WordPress is adding and I love it! If you are interested in reading more about hover cards (since Twitter and Facebook and others use it), you can read about them at my site.
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One click less i always best – unfortunately now I need to update my G profile @->
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I am turning this off – in my opinion should have been off by default. Several of my commentors have identifying information pop up, and knowing them personally to be clueless about the Internet, I am very confident this is NOT what they want or expect, regardless of whatever they may have agreed to in Gravatar or wherever (even tracing this back is frustrating – I noticed the behaviour and only finding this thread has given me the slightest clue what the heck is going on and how to turn it off). WP – you need to work much harder on your communication skills and sudden changes – cf. the Coraline thing. Give users a proper heads up via email that important “improvements” are pending and advance notice on how to turn them off or opt in/opt out. Not all change is a good thing that is universally welcomed.
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I like this feature.
I’d like to change the information displayed but can’t instructions on how to change it.
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You can change your profile information either by clicking your name (top-right) in your wp-admin area, or you can go to http://gravatar.com and edit it there.
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I think it is a very good idea to see people on WP
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awesome feature. can’t wait for the plugin for stand alone users 🙂
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Re: ” Turn off Hovercards”
Ok, I cleared my cookies and it works again.
B-l-u-s-h ;-(
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@Beau Lebens : oh ! thanks ! you should have put the link somewhere, I was searching for that for several weeks without finding it !
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beautiful idea! It gives a more friendly approach to people, their ideas and comments.
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Thanks for the article Scott. This certainly seems like a good way to connect with other bloggers.
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Thanks for all of your hard work to make our online blogging experience the best! You guys rock!
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Would have been better if you hadn’t sacrificed the mShots (the links preview thing that happens when you hover over a link in a post). I loved that. Why did you take it away?
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This didn’t specifically replace mShots, we’ve just disabled mShots until we can improve the system behind it a bit more and make it more stable.
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Very nice! I like this feature!
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What does my card say?
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You can preview your own card on the Settings > Discussion page of your blog here on WordPress.com by hovering over your Gravatar next to the “Gravatar Hovercards” setting.
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Nice way to check out a blogger without having to “click.”
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I Digg It =)!
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This is AWESOME!
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A great implementation of a great idea. Who we are, now really easy to know…
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This is cool Love it nice feature, another cool feature !
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Nice. I’m with the guy who said he didn’t know if he wanted everyone to know who he was, ;o) but this is pretty cool. Not sure how useful it is for me just yet, but who knows what the future can hold.
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Really great feature, having a bit of trouble updating my Gravatar details but I guess it’s because I’m stuck behind the Great Chinese Firewall.
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This is very useful. Thanks!!
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I’m not usually one for embracing all the bells and whistles, but this meets with my definite approval!
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Nice features wp. and thanks for providing an option to turn it on or off. 🙂
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That is a very good idea saving significant amount of time
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Neat!
Really neat.
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Superfluous icing on an already sufficient cake.
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Sounds good! 🙂
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A new era for Gravatar awesomeness indeed! xD I saw it on my CP cheat site and thought it was really cool so i came and read about it straight away!
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its very nice i mean i think its a great idea god job
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Very cool. Now I’ll definitely be more inclined to make more comments on other websites.
Such as this one. 😉
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not bad. I like it
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Awesome feature!
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I’m going to check it out now. Thanks!
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Wow, nice! Gravatar gets a long needed update. Nice job!
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cool
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i like it!
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hay dear
see a big site on almiyat o rohaniya
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