Show HN: Avatars.io - simple API for integrating avatars into your app or site

by gregarious • 14 years ago

181 39 14 years ago

arrowgunz• 14 years ago

The app makes avatar integration so seamless. Wonderful job guys. Love it. I've always been using Gravatar which is great too. But having access to all the avatars from various social networks is a huge plus. +10

gregarious11• 14 years ago

Thanks! We think Gravatar is a great service, but as more and more apps use social networks and more, having more options is great.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Why would I want to move from using Gravatar... to using Gravatar through Avatars.io. If I have to manually support all of these URLs, there's not a ton of benefit from just using the site specific URLs as it is, and I now have a dependency (And thus risk) on avatars.io. Maybe I'm missing something that this enables? (I mean, the URLs are certainly pretty, clean and consistent!)

vailripper• 14 years ago

Agreed. What WOULD be helpful is a service that would look for an avatar on various services, and serve the first one it finds. So if a user doesn't have a gravatar, it looks up their facebook based on their email - and uses that avatar, then twitter, etc.

gregarious11• 14 years ago

That's a great idea. As long as the info is public then that would totally be something worth doing.

We'll keep that in mind as we improve the service.

jjb123• 14 years ago

This would be great - and if it finds a few, give the user the option to select one of the ones it finds on the various social services.

gregarious11• 14 years ago

Hi,

We made it so that you don't have to stop using Gravatar, but can expand to include other services.

Probably the biggest win, though, is that you can also allow for your users to easily upload their own.

Greg

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

I guess I am still confused. I don't mean to belittle what you're doing, I just don't understand the value it adds for me. I suppose maybe your gems or prebuilt packages make it more transparent, but at the end of the day, my code still has to know whether to load avatars.io/{facebook,twitter,gravatar} etc, thus there isn't really a significant layer of abstraction? (Like I said, really just trying to wrap my head around it here)

nicholaides2• 14 years ago

Most sites' users aren't technically sophisticated enough to know how to or want to use Gravatar.

rogerbinns2• 14 years ago

This user is perfectly sophisticated enough. However I refuse to use Gravatar since it requires having a Wordpress account whose terms and conditions I will not agree to.

choxi• 14 years ago

what a great looking site (this and Chute too). but... maybe you could explain the value a little better to me? the avatar URLs for facebook and twitter are:

http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/:username.png?s...

http://graph.facebook.com/:username/picture?type=:type

granted, your API has cleaner and more consistent routes,

http://avatars.io/twitter/:username

http://avatars.io/facebook/:username

But it's not a huge difference as far as I can tell.

As far as uploading avatars goes... I guess that can be a little more difficult but your process doesn't seem a whole lot simpler than just uploading to s3. I would definitely be more interested if you did on-the-fly image manipulation like cropping and centering around faces, maybe you could look into the Dragonfly gem if this is a Ruby app.

gregarious11• 14 years ago

Hi,

Great questions. Let me answer them one by one.

Avatar URLs - we are normalizing the way you access them regardless of the service. Also, we'll be keeping these up to date. For example, when an instagram profile photo changes, it will result in broken images unless you go update it. We're doing the queueing to make sure you don't have to.

Uploading - the platform we've built actually does a great number of things on the upload side. We've limited it down to the resizing to the appropriate sizes. The ability to use custom identifiers for your avatars lets you build the route to them instead of having to store the full path which we think is a help when putting together dynamic apps.

Enhancements - we're working on a number of the items you've mentioned as possible improvements down the line. Dragonfly is a great recommendation for this sort of stuff.

Killswitch• 14 years ago

Love the idea, it's like an updated Gravatar... Gravatar has been very stale lately.

zashapiro• 14 years ago

Agreed. Gravatar is pretty much the worst.

amix• 14 years ago

Shouldn't this be a library that we can run on our own servers? I simply don't understand the recent influx of things that should be libraries.

I think building our infrastructure around free things that can be taken down at anytime is the wrong way to go. This "API services" should not be encouraged. Give us the source and let us run it on our own servers, let us modify it the way we see fit... This is what should be encouraged. "API library services" is just a lame way to get people locked down to a set of APIs that they have no control over.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

If you provide something as a service instead of an open source library, you can theoretically monetize it in the future (in a more direct fashion than the standard FOSS support contact) which makes it possible to use to generate VC interest, which is harder to do with a pure open source option. I'm fairly sure that's why it has become common to do this, though in pure practical terms I agree with you that this system isn't ideal.

Personally, I just ignore these services because virtually always the risk of building on them and having them suddenly disappear outside of your control far outweighs the time they save you in building your own thing.

beefsack• 14 years ago

I still believe building open source libraries, then building a paid service using those libraries is the best way to have your cake and eat it too. A fantastic example of this is Shopify and ActiveMerchant.

romaniv• 14 years ago

Good point. And it's not just availability, it's privacy and security too. When a service like that becomes popular, it can easily be used by tracking people online. It can also be a lucrative target for attacks, since the impact will affect many websites at once.

nicholaides2• 14 years ago

It's not about proving library-like functionality. It's about providing infrastructure that their customers don't have to build and maintain.

Managing avatars has non-obvious challenges/headaches: - uploading images, downloading from services, and processing images to the right size should happen asynchronously. That's not easy in every web framework, and even when it's easy, it's mean you have to manage that infrastructure. - you might want to periodically update your avatars from Facebook/Twitter in case your users change theirs - sometimes you may have to retry downloading avatars from Facebook/Twitter

This is the point of all "cloud" services. Some people think "I can run Linux on my own machine, I don't Amazon EC2", and that's fine, but obviously there is a need for services that provide or hide infrastructure. Some companies, like startups for instance, are willing to accept the risks that external dependencies have to attain the benefits of not having to manage the infrastructure.

lincolnq• 14 years ago

I couldn't disagree more. As an overworked startup founder who regularly uses services like this, SAAS has been a godsend. I hate configuring libraries, especially stuff like this that needs write access to a filesystem, database, etc. Just host it for me and I'm a happy camper.

(The only thing I generally require is that I be able to do something sane for testing locally without internet access. I don't care what it is as long as it enables me to minimally test.)

jondot• 14 years ago

Yes, it should. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4107459

wmcreate• 14 years ago

Great work. Very useful service. Now only if there was an easy(ier) way to crop, enhance, tag, etc across platforms.

gregarious11• 14 years ago

We definitely agree! And we hope to solve that some more if we can.

The mobile components provide cropping and scaling out of the box.

timjahn3• 14 years ago

This hits home for me, as I just recently built a super simple avatar system for our MVP of matchist.com. I wish there was a simple "plug it in" library that handled my user avatar functionality, letting users choose between Gravatar, Facebook, Twitter, etc., handling the OAuth, etc.

I like the idea behind this, but as others have commented, I'm not sure how this solves the problem. This seems like the same work I've already done, except now it's all hosted with you, and I don't know you well enough to trust you to handle this aspect of my web app.

gregarious11• 14 years ago

Tim,

I think we agree that this is a challenge, especially as you want to add more diversity to the methods you support.

A service like avatars.io does really well before you've invested any effort into solving your own Avatar support. We'll continue to add a number of other features and make the service more functional for even more diverse needs.

As for trusting us now or later, I agree that's the risk that is there for all of us as we evaluate any potential new service. That's not something we expect anyone to do without great consideration and only time delivering a great solution can win that kind of confidence.

Re: gravatar being enough. I agree that it is not the most widely used service and ideally we'd love to see our users having the option to customize their experience per app - as opposed to universally. We started with uploads since our platform manages that handily and many developers who approached us initially were seeking to use Chute specifically for their site's avatars.

Thanks for your thoughts, and I welcome any feedback you have that can help make the service better.

timjahn3• 14 years ago

An example of how I still have to do the work is Facebook. In your example, you need the Facebook ID to get the avatar. You can do that already using a simple URL from Facebook, just plugging in the ID in the appropriate spot (which is how I'm doing it now).

To get the ID, you need the user to "login using Facebook" via OAuth, etc. Using your service, I still need to do that (like I'm already doing now). That's what I mean by it's the same amount of work.

(Correct me if I'm wrong about the Facebook part with your service.)

jimsmi6• 14 years ago

You should add support for more providers, like Unicornify:

http://unicornify.appspot.com/

ChiperSoft• 14 years ago

Are you guys working on a PHP library, or will I need to roll my own?

gregarious11• 14 years ago

We haven't started on a PHP library as of yet. Most of our team is on the Ruby/Node side of things.

Would be happy to work with you on the PHP version though!

Feel free to email me gregarious AT getchute DOT com

gregarious11• 14 years ago

Checked with one of our guys who does PHP. He's gonna give it a try in the next day or so.

It will live here: https://github.com/chute/avatars-io-php

shinuza• 14 years ago

I'll say something not related to the service but to the .title image.

- You'd most likely want to do a sprite with the mousehover/mouseout images - Both images are 75kb-ish, so you'd probably want to display/hide the bandage (still in a sprite) on mouseover/mouseout - The eye moves slightly down when you hover it

Show HN: Avatars.io - simple API for integrating avatars into your app or site

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