Android app: Never liked the not-so-human look of the little green Androids? Wished that they were more handsome and charming just like you?

If you own an Android device, you could just do that. Google had just release Androidify to the Android Market, an app which you could customize the green Android with different hair styles, eyewear, beards, clothings, shoes and other accessories.

It’s like a little dressing game which you could make the Android look just like you, or rather, make yourself look like an Android. You could then share it across social networks or make it your avatar across the web.

©2011 SheepTech

Turn Yourself Into An Android Avatar with Androidify

But this doesn’t mean that you would have to give up using Gravatar. If a commenter does not have a Twitter account, his Gravatar will be loaded instead, provided he has one. Otherwise, a default avatar (of your choice) will be displayed.

I would rather have Gravatar to be the first choice though. If the user has no Gravatar, then only go for Twitter. Reason is one would expect their Gravatar to be used on blogs, but not their Twitter’s avatar. They might have a more personal avatar on Twitter, and different image for Gravatar that’s more to blog branding.

The implementation of Twittar is more customizable than Gravatar (via the built in feature) in general, with the possibility to specify a CSS class. Meaning you can style it all you want to make it good looking.

For now SheepTech would stick with Gravatar, for I prefer not to have Gravatar to be in the second place to make way for Twitter avatar.

©2011 SheepTech

Twittar: Use Twitter Avatar in WordPress Comments

The good of Blogicon is there is no need to register any accounts, just upload an image of 80×80 with the name blogicon.gif in your root directory (yourdomain.com/blogicon.gif) and it will be displayed everytime you comment on participating blogs.

The bad is no one is managing the system. For MyBlogLog, there is a team behind it moderating. If someone uploads an adult image as his Blogicon and he comments on participating blogs, it will be displayed—and that will do nothing good to the blog. Since the format is in gif, it can even be a moving avatar.

As we are required to upload an image to our host first before we can have our avatar being displayed, it is quite unfair to bloggers who are using Blogger or WordPress.com. As far as I know, it is not possible to upload an image to the root directory of a free hosted blogs.

Furthermore, MyBlogLog has had already a very large user base, resulting in less people wanting to install the Blogicon plugin on their blogs—but MyBlogLog’s plugin. MyBlogLog also make it 100% sure the author of the comment matches the avatar. Blogicon is retrieving avatars based on the URL the comment author enter. Meaning if I enter someone else’s blog URL while commenting, your avatar will be shown instead.

What do you think?

©2011 SheepTech

Can Blogicon Replace Existing Blog Avatar?