Since the time I first saw them I’d thought that Gravatars, Favatars and FOAFatars (OK, I made that last one up but this is what I mean) were cool, but useless. I appear to have just proved myself wrong.

I regularly read Rich Rutter’s blog Clagnut, and he recently implemented Gravatars on his site. On some of his recent posts a guy called Rob Mientjes had left some comments, and he’s got a Gravatar enabled which I’d noticed and thought “hey, that’s a nice-looking Gravatar”, and then forgotten all about.

Tonight I was just idly browsing Flickr, looking at all of the photos tagged with “London”, when I saw a photo of the Make Poverty History rally, so I clicked the link to see all of the photos tagged with “make poverty history” and saw a photo by Neil T (who I happened to know was Neil Turner of neilturner.me.uk fame, and reasonably local to me).

So I browsed around his photos a little, to see what was new, and came across this one where one person had left a comment on that photo: Rob Mientjes. I would never have recognised the name, but his Flickr avatar is the same as his Gravatar and was instantly recognisable, so just by seeing the picture next to his comment, I knew exactly who he was, and why he was probably looking at Neil’s photos. Astonishing. Quite frankly, I’m almost more amazed that some part of my brain is actually dedicated to remembering these things 🙂