Gravatar is amazing, isn’t it? I don’t usually think about it, but it’s really cool to be able to read a blog post, look at the comments, recognize someone that you know by their unique picture, then post your own comment and be recognized in return. All without uploading any files to the site you’re visiting. Pretty cool huh? Let’s take it to the next level!

A problem I sometimes notice, though, is that people’s gravatars don’t always match the the mood of the conversation. There are two extremes. One could be discussing a serious subject, but have a gravatar that is jovial and humorous. This might not always be appropriate. On the other hand, they could be involved in a humor thread, and then have a serious gravatar that just doesn’t fit the situation.

You can, of course, have multiple emails associated with your Gravatar account, but who wants to set up an email account for every mood they might be in? Once again, Google Plus Addressing comes to the rescue.

So what you can do is to map different gravatars to the same email, with different plus addresses.

Here are some examples I just create (note: I took two of the pictures with my phone, and yes, my hair is getting long).

will+happy@itsananderson.com

will+sad@itsananderson.com

will+surprised@itsananderson.com

This is a boring example, but hopefully you get the idea.

Unfortunately, you still have to verify each email on Gravatar, even though it goes to the same inbox. Wouldn’t it be great if Gravatar let you do this automatically? Just upload a picture and associate it with an email, then choose a tag that can be used to access that picture. I don’t think it would be that hard, and it would be totally awesome to use!