Using your Twitter avatar anywhere

January 11, 2009 / Filed under: Twitter, Avatars, Programming, Tips

I dislike having to manage my avatar in all the different social networks and applications I'm involved with. I'd like to maintain only one avatar image, and have that reflected everywhere.

There's Gravatar, which associates an email address with your avatar, providing a common point of entry (everyone has an email address). However, Gravatar is more geared towards developers looking to dynamically implement avatars on blogs. Support for Gravatar in social networks is non-existent, which is a shame because it seems like there is an opportunity for this type of service.

Until something useful comes along, I will stick to my current approach, which is using my Twitter avatar, since I am most active on that social network and pay close attention to my avatar there.

Manually obtain your Twitter avatar

To use your Twitter avatar on other social networks or sites, be sure that network allows you to post an avatar by URL. Many networks do not, such as Facebook, who require you to upload an image, or take a new picture with a web cam.

To obtain your Twitter avatar URL, click on your own avatar from your Twitter profile page.

Screenshot of Twitter.com

Then, right-click on the avatar and choose Copy Image Location (Firefox).

Screenshot of Twitter.com

You will then have a URL copied to your clipboard which will look something like this:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/63778129/icon.jpg

This is the URL to your current Twitter avatar. Feel free to use this wherever you need to reference your avatar.

Drawbacks

There is a drawback to this approach. Anytime you upload a new avatar, that URL may change. So you'll have to re-copy the URL and replace all instances of it elsewhere. Also, sometimes I've noticed even if I don't change my avatar, the URL sometimes changes. Weird behavior, but something to watch out for.

Using the API

If you're a programmer and would like to use the Twitter API to obtain your avatar, it's a simple call to the user method "show", which returns lots of useful information about a specific Twitter user.

For the avatar, you'll want to fetch the <profile_image_url>node value.

Screenshot of XML document in Firefox

Using the API is more reliable since you'll always obtain the exact URL, even if it changes.

Comments/Mentions

# Vishal at 1/13/2009 12:17 pm cst

I would not recommend using this approach, since you are using twitter's s3 bandwidth for your gain and at twitter's cost aka hotlinking.

The best place to host your avatar is either on your own site or on free hosting services like pages.google.com, flickr, picasa...

Then you can use it at twitter and elsewhere.

Vishal http://vishalshah.org

# Matt Thommes at 1/13/2009 1:40 pm cst

Woops, sorry Vishal. I didn't mean to directly promote image hotlinking. I really just wanted to express that Twitter is the only avatar I truly maintain regularly (by changing it often, etc), and show users ways to obtain the image for use elsewhere.

How they use that URL is up to them. They could hotlink, sure. But they could also just download it and re-upload to other networks, or simply reference the URL in a non-intrusive, non-hotlinking manner.

I've adjusted the article to include a sentence about image hotlinking. Hope that clarifies my intentions.

Thanks.

# Vishal at 1/14/2009 1:43 pm cst

thx for clarifying, m@.

as always, a pleasure to catch up with pitt.

# techwraith at 5/22/2009 2:30 pm cst

Actually, twitter puts the avatar link in the API for a reason - use it!