I think if your app is based solely on email addresses now, Gravatar will serve you well.
When we started building this service, a lot of people wanted a simple way to handle their own avatars - that is letting users upload their own photos and not send them to Gravatar to do that. That's likely the biggest win for everyone.
Also, a lot of apps are using more than email now so our goal is to offer that as an option. Being able to simple ask someone which avatar they want to use and storing that, as opposed to just an email gives the users more options - and we'll keep track as they change their avatars.
Not sure that clarifies it much, but that's a big part of how we built this particular solution.
"I think if your app is based solely on email addresses now, Gravatar will serve you well."
Not necessarily. We're using emails as the identifier for matchist.com but based on some initial research (you can easily determine if an email has a Gravatar image associated with it), not everybody has a Gravatar.
When we started building this service, a lot of people wanted a simple way to handle their own avatars - that is letting users upload their own photos and not send them to Gravatar to do that. That's likely the biggest win for everyone.
Also, a lot of apps are using more than email now so our goal is to offer that as an option. Being able to simple ask someone which avatar they want to use and storing that, as opposed to just an email gives the users more options - and we'll keep track as they change their avatars.
Not sure that clarifies it much, but that's a big part of how we built this particular solution.