Database Reference
In-Depth Information
<mobileurl>http://m.flickr.com/photostream.gne?id=10317</mobileurl>
<photos>
<firstdatetaken>2002-08-03 13:40:04</firstdatetaken>
<firstdate>1093117877</firstdate>
<count>1379</count>
</photos>
</person>
</rsp>
This service lets you pass in an MD5 hash of an email address, and for registered users, it will
return a portrait image. Thanks to its integration with Wordpress, quite a few people have signed
up, so it can be a good way of providing at least default avatars for your own users. You could
also save yourself some coding by directing new users to Gravatar's portrait creation interface.
There's also
a proile lookup API
available, but I haven't had any experience with how well-pop-
ulated this is:
md5 -s pete@mailana.com
MD5 ("pete@mailana.com") = 03e801b74b01f23957a3afdd9aaaed00
<img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/03e801b74b01f23957a3afdd9aaaed00" />
Figure1-3.Gravatar portrait image
Like Yahoo!, Amazon doesn't expose very much information about each user when you look up
an email address, but you can often get at least a location. The sheer size of Amazon's user base
means that you'll ind information on a large percentage of emails. There's also the chance to
discover public wishlists, which could be helpful for creating default interests for your new users'
proiles.
The API is REST/XML-based, but it does require
a somewhat complex URL signing scheme
for authentication.
