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.
WordPress.com News 
This is cool! Love it!
Great idea, but I’m not quite sure I want everyone to know who I am lol
Nice :). Should be very useful for blogs with a lot of comments like this one. It’s almost like your online business card :).
Mbuso. thanks for the info on gravatar. Setting off to set me own.
Lebo
Interesting, looking forward to checking it out.
super cool!
Hey Scott! You might want to run spiel cheek.
Spiel cheek done and redone – Thanks Daniel.
wow thats cool. This feature will save time by providing person’s info just by moving around.
Hey this is really cool! I’m off to try it all out!
For those of us who don’t want more moving parts and bloated pageloads, is there a way to opt-out of this ‘feature’? It’s a little too reminiscent of snap.com’s beloved “Snap Shots” (circa 2007).
We spent significant time trying to minimize false positives for when these cards appear. There’s a well timed delay, so errant mouseovers where you happen to cross over a Gravatar are very unlikely to cause them to fire.
We do provide a way to turn them off on your own blog if you don’t want them. Go to Dashboard-Settings-Discussion, and look under Avatar.
We also just added a feature that allows blog visitors to never see Hovercards across all of WordPress.com.
https://wordpress.com/support/gravatar-hovercards/#to-turn-off-hovercards-for-all-wordpress-com-sites
Very nice! I guess it’s time to make sure the info on my Gravatar profile is updated. Thank you!
Nice work. What will be really awesome is if this makes it way into WordPress.org as a plugin, or better yet in the core.
Hey, what’s the chance of getting this as a plugin for self-hosted blogs?
We’ll be bringing this to self-hosted blogs in the very near future.
What a great new feature
Wow, this is really cool! Props to WP for this! Me like! 😉
This… is…. awesome!
… just read that I can switch them off! Whew – cancel rant!
i am having an averse reaction to that feature at this moment
This can be very interesting!.
I think this just killed off Google profiles for me. Not sure if I should even update it after this. 😉
One last (annoying) comment. Any word about bringing this over for IntenseDebate fans? 🙂
This is a really cool feature, so is this working now?? Hover over my icon and find out!! Well done (again) wordpress
Sweet!
WOOOW! 😉
Looks nice: will give this a try. Thanks WordPress
This would be even better if I could change my account name on wordpress – except of course I cannot, because I own the blog with the name I would want (and apparently doing a SQL UPDATE statement is totally impossible, according to the support staff)
Wow another new great feature just another great reason why WP.com is the best free blogging platform on the net!!!
cool!
Cool!
Love it! WordPress just ups the ante everyday.
I guess I’m in the minority, but I don’t like the distraction and annoyance of having a gravatar pop up when I’m trying to read a comment. I think this should have been allowed by the blogger, not installed automatically without blogger approval. I know how to turn it off, I just think I should have made the decision in the first place about it.
Kathleen
As you mentioned, blog owners can turn off Hovercards for their own sites. We also just added a feature that allows blog visitors to never see Hovercards across all of WordPress.com.
https://wordpress.com/support/gravatar-hovercards/#to-turn-off-hovercards-for-all-wordpress-com-sites
I really like this–congrats on another great feature.
Now that I’m here, I may as well get all the way in to all this new technology. Yikes, I feel like I’m ‘with the program’ all of a sudden . . . Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
(Ooops, you don’t really need to know I’m old, now, do you?)
and the cool stuff keeps on coming from the wordpress crew!!!
Thanks!
Great idea!
I think the “Social Media Map” in my sidebar is about to get a *serious* update. “-)
This is pretty cool.
Plus, it actually forced me to write something in my gravatar profile… 🙂
I just pray and hope that you guys don’t get tired of rolling out newer and more awesome features. 😎
Cool! You gies always have great ideas. Thanks
I don’t see twitter, linkedin and other social networking links. Just personal blog/site links appear on hovercard.
We only show information that a user has chosen to share openly, so if they haven’t entered it, we won’t show it 🙂
Wow cool 😀
wow. this is cool!
Brilliant!
Lovely implementation.
This could be really good, but those of us who are concerned about their Internet profile for professional reasons, may not want to identify ourselves my name… I’m sure there’s a workaround though.
Yup. Just don’t include anything in your profile that you don’t want anyone to see 🙂
Really cool.
Just an update . . . This has inspired/forced me to catch some typos in my bio and add some more info. to make things interesting. This is a spot I never would have given a second thought to since it was basically hidden on my dashboard . . . once I hovered over it in ‘comments’, though, the errors and omissions were glaring.
THANK YOU!
(Now all we need is spell-check for comments, lol.)
I spotted this just this evening and would have been pleased about it if the image weren’t so big! It obscured most of the comment area. Maybe they could be made smaller? Also…. do they have to be black? It’s such a depressing ‘colour’.
Hovercards are roughly the size of a business card, just enough information to show who you are and what you do. They’re also only as big as the amount of information we have. So for example your card is nice and slim, since you don’t have much information in your profile.
Since the cards appear everywhere, we’re limited to neutral colors so they’ll look ok in most places. I’d go for hot pink myself, or polka dots, but that might clash with the themes many people have chosen for their blogs. Or not 🙂
Awesomeness once again.
This is awesome feature…
really nice Gravatar Hovercards but my wp profil is active 😉
Interesting!!!
Very nice!
so cool..
Yes, an online business card. Way cool! Now I have to FIX my Gravatar info. Need, more, hours, in, the, day!
This is quite an interesting feature, thanks guys! =D
KKKOOOOLL!!
This is great!!
I just hovered over myself and got excited, lol. thanks again!
Excellent feature!
Very cooooool =D Nice one!
I love the black. Classy. Does this work with those who comment without leaving a gravatar? I’m having some issues with a few commenters and dead links appearing in emails. This nice little gadget has the potential to stop that nonsense, as well as some with multi-sites who argue with themselves, comment on “each other’s” sites and posts, then leave “opposing” poiints of views on the sites of others. Now, understand, some of this is funny when you know who is doing this, but I have an issue with deadlinks or links that never load and all I have is blank screen, then my computer freezes. I have a real serious issue with that, in fact.
Awesome again, Sir!!
Wish my other “family” were as great and caring.
Shalom!
Hello WP & The Gravatar Team. I like how Gravatar is shaping up but there’s still a lot of ground to cover. I am using Google Public Profiles and it enables people to get in touch with me without me revealing my ID. I think you guys should do something similar since getting in touch with a person through “Gravatar” means you have to volunteer your mail/gtalk/chat ID. I use a personal one but am not too comfortable sharing it with people i don’t know. There should be a “SEND MESSAGE”/”Yahoo Pingbox” option with a nice “email/chat icon” to make it prominent (sizing options will be very welcome) while also making it visually appealing. Thanks again though. Keep up the good work. Salil, IN
Over time, we’ll probably be adding to/tweaking the content in hovercards and Gravatar Profiles in general. Thanks for the suggestion 🙂
PS: As a hack, you can add whatever links you want to your Gravatar profile. A contact form, for example?
I love it! A great way to advertise yourself in WordPress! Just check your Gravatar info first to make sure that there’s nothing showing that you wouldn’t want others to see or access.
Really cool!
Hi Scott,
Can I have a Gravatar Hovercard pop up for my own Gravatar Widget on my Sidebar ?
Till now, visitors have had to click on my Gravatar photo in the widget to reach my Gravatar.
My Blog is hosted on WordPress.com with the domain name http://mitaroygoahotel.com
Cheers
Mihir
I’ve just checked and it looks as though your Gravatar is showing a hovercard.
looks interesting ….
i might try this 🙂
I got lucky with this feature! I accidentally hovered over my gravatar and found out that I need to update my profile! Thanks!!
Brilliant!
saw it. love it. you guys are awesome. thanks as always! i ❤ WP! 😀
Hovercard is cool ~ ~ ~ ~ thank….
smile contents!
As if you’re reading my mind ..
wow .. Amazing feature .. Now we can get to others press through gravatar .. ^^
Thanks
cool one. hats off… salute
So when is this gonna be rolled to self-hosted wordpress.org blogs?
We’ll be rolling out self-hosted support very soon, we can’t commit to a specific date just yet.
very useful. thx!
hey thats fun!!
~thakx WP! xD
This is pretty cool, although at first I had no idea what was happening, haha
nice one! 🙂
Awesome! Now I’m checking every comment in this post just to see people’s hovercards. Love it! 🙂
Pop-ups suck. The rest of the internet learned this some years ago. Hopefully you will catch up one day.
I would argue the opposite, they are becoming a fairly common UI practice. Many major sites have implemented some form of hovercard in the past year including Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Linked In, and lots more.
This is a great idea. Knowing your demographic plays a big role in good writing. And sometimes the demographic you aim for is not the one who responds. I like the fact that I can get my reality straight so easily.
Awesome!
what a really cool job, thx a lot
ঃ)
Great! And I’d really love to read a global vision-statement of Automattic for WordPress(.com): Where are you, where are we going to? Slowly but surely it feels like some kind of a distributed social network, a blogged network of networks…
Great job! Another cool feature!!
Nice feature.
I love it!
Unfortunately it doesn’t take me to the Blogger’s Blog, but hopefully everyone will update their profiles.
WordPress Rocks!
nice
Simply Awesome!
Sorry to rain on everyone’s parade, and Gravatars are seem to be getting on the the way now – for me. Gravatars may be kinda “neat”, but both the Authors and Gravatars widgets now force any click to the Gravatar page. What if I want to have my profile aurthor image to link to a custom URL – like it used to do. The custom URL seems to be ignored now.
How do I have my profile/author picture link to a custom URL of my choice?
We’re working on getting everything squared away. Thanks for the feedback.
Very cool, thanks for sharing, will look into this further to see what it is all about.
Great idea!!! I second the guy that likened it to an online business card. Pretty awesome stuff:)
http://coffeecounsel.wordpress.com/