In order to have a single image representing me, I need to put it in the following places:
- Address Book.app
- Dopplr
- Flickr
- myOpenID
- Tumblr
… and stuff I only use occasionally: Gmail, Vimeo, iusethis, YouTube, FriendFeed, and so on.
There are a variety of roads to the goal of a single profile image — Gravatar, the hCard microformat, and OpenID, among others — but none are universal. I’d like to see the latter two win, but microformats are a solution whose problem hasn’t fully appeared, and OpenID has only begun to see any sort of widespread implementation. OpenID does seem to be on an upward rise, though, so I have hope there; microformats are still uncertain, due to both the lack of practical application and the technicality of implementation.
