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Seven and a half questions for Tom Werner
Saturday April 2, 2005
Tom Werner is the inventor of the Gravatar, Geek in chief at his print and web design company Cube6 Media and fellow pilot of the soon, sometime this year, honest, to be launched Web Standards Wiki.
He recently served up his 100 millionth Gravatar and still managed to find the time to put up quite the most impressive picture I have ever seen on a weblog.
Okay, so we all know you do the comment enhancement thing but what else do you do all day long? Or in greek, what is your skillset?
Gravatars are perhaps what I am best known for, but while I'm not rating gravatars, I'm running my design studio. I come from a programming background so our web projects often involve custom content management systems built with PHP. Web standards are extremely important to me, and all of our web work is forward looking. I'm also fond of print work, and find the challenges of a fixed medium a nice break from the just-one-more-update nature of the web. I work closely with the largest printer in the northern San Diego region and specialize in usable forms and clean, innovative business and marketing materials. When I can, I take photography assignments. Some cosmetics photos I recently took for Evolution Surf are featured right now on the home page of the Saks Fifth Avenue website (I designed the labels, too). I also used to do quite a bit of Windows and Solaris systems administration back in the day, so I run a dedicated server and provide hosting for many of my clients.
I get the feeling there is a bigger picture with these little comment avatars of yours, where do you see Gravatar five years from now?
You're right. Gravatars are only the beginning to what I envision as a comprehensive comment management and profile system.
How often have you left a comment on a weblog and never returned to follow up on the ensuing conversation? It happens to me all the time. I forget the URL, and I'm not about to go subscribing to the comment feeds for every weblog I frequent, so commenting can almost seem futile. The gravatar system is uniquely positioned to solve this problem. Since all gravatars are served from a central location, I have the ability to determine (through the HTTP referrer header) what gravatars appear on what web pages. Using this information I can auto-discover the comment feeds (if they are available) for those web pages and automatically aggregate them into a single feed of comments for only those posts on which you have already commented. The simple act of your gravatar appearing on a page would be enough to have follow up comments start appearing in your relevant comments feed available from gravatar.com!
Another problem with weblogs and comments is identifying them with their real life authors. Imagine being able to click any gravatar and being taken to a global profile available from gravatar.com. You could see that person's photo, a list of their websites, some biographical information, contact info, etc. Only as much as the person wishes you to see, of course, but it would go a long way towards humanizing the online weblog community.
I've even considered taking Gravatar into the centralized consumer information market (think Microsoft Passport), but that's a long way in the future and requires a lot more thought. It would certainly be interesting to use gravatars as a way to make micropayments to weblogs. You could load up your gravatar account with, say, $20, and specify a $0.25 payment to weblog owners when you comment on their site. It would create a weblog marketplace and it could really infuse the community with non-commerical money, which would lead to better articles more often. I think the impact could be huge. But that requires a per-weblog security mechanism which I haven't quite figured out yet. I'm open to any ideas in this area.
So, are there any other projects on the horizon you want to tell us about?
I'm hesitant to say much because they're still in the planning stages, but Rob Cameron and I are working on something called the "Pixel Fight Project" that we think all you graphic designers out there will enjoy. There's another more business oriented app I'm planning that will be called "SalesKeeper." And as if that's not enough, there's a little something called "TypeForge" stirring in my head. I do love my projects!
Do you think we'll ever get the web standards wiki finished?
Not if we don't start working on it! Seriously though, The WSW is a great project and I think it'll take a lot of effort and time, but it'll be worth it, and it'll get done. With such a great team on board, this ship is sailing for sure.
The response to Gravatar has, on the whole, been very positive but there have been a few skeptical reviews, why do you think that is and how have you responded to and/or acted upon this feedback?
Life is full of all sorts of little lessons. I've learned that the best way to deal with web critics is this: listen but don't respond. Any time you offer a public service you need to keep your finger on the pulse of the userbase, but getting entangled in a flame war is both unproductive and reflects negatively on you and your product. If the criticism is valid, pay heed and make changes, if it is ill informed and inflammatory, move on. Engaging in an argument with that type of person only feeds their need for attention and lends credibility to their claims.
As far as the reasons for skepticism: any new technology that affects how we interact with things is going to be subject to some resistance. Some people think gravatars clutter up the page, make it load slowly, present a security problem, or just plain make pages ugly. I think a lot of implementors could use a few simple CSS lessons in order to style and place their gravatars in a more pleasing manner, but the simple fact that gravatars are useful is undeniable. When I don't see gravatars on a long list of comments, I miss them. They just make recognizing commenters and scanning for specific authors so easy. Overall the criticism has been very minimal, and as shown by the number that have been served, people seem to like them!
What music do you like to listen to when you are working?
I like a bit of House (Fluke, Leftfield, Underworld) when I'm coding, something a little mellower for graphic design (Hooverphonic, Portishead, DJ Shadow), anything turned up loud during those long studio photography sessions, and complete silence when I'm fixing a server meltdown at 3am. Oh, and Pink Floyd for all those times inbetween.
You've been doing some development with Ruby on Rails recently, how do you find it to work with?
When I started learning and using Ruby on Rails it was like I'd gone all my life having to bake and cut bread into slices using a butter knife, then having someone come along and tell me I could just buy sliced bread at the grocery store. PHP can do it all, but requires a big time investment in order to knead it into a proper MVC model. Rails is premade and already cooked. It provides a rich core of MVC functionality and an automatic database object model which means all you have to do is think about your application logic, not all the low level details. Plus, Ruby as a language is such a step above C /Java/PHP that it makes me wonder why it is not yet today's dominant language. I'm so enamored with Rails that I intend to dump PHP altogether and use Rails for the bulk of my future projects.
You may also find it interesting to know that Cube6 Media will soon be offering affordable Ruby on Rails hosting packages (on FreeBSD servers with Plesk) in the near future. Rails hosting requires some special considerations and is presently offered by very few hosts. I plan on being a major provider in the coming years.
Well thanks very much for taking the time Tom, just the half to do. Who would you...
...rather be, Superman or Batman?
The obvious pick is Superman, but I'm going to have to go with Batman on this one. While the whole flying/invincibility/seeing-through-women's-clothing thing would be nice, it's too easy. Superman has his gifts because our yellow sun gives him special abilities. Batman only has the powers of wit, courage, and tenacity. Batman is human, and he's a superhero in spite of that, whereas superman remains super even if he sits around eating cheetos and drinking Budweiser for six years. Take away Superman's super-powers and I bet you fifty bucks he'd be cowering in the corner with his little Krypton blanky. Batman doesn't need no stinking super-powers in order to fight crime. He's a real man.
Update
This article was originally published on April the 1st. I re-published it on the 2nd to give it more time at the top of the stack, as it so rightly deserves.
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