After I updated my profile picture today, a friend of mine responded with:
Build a service that changes your profile picture in all social networks!
He also didn't like the new profile picture, but that's his problem. My first response was fuck off “Gravatar?”. Obviously he didn't mean Gravatar, I just mentioned it to annoy him.
A service which automagically just updates your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Gravatar, ... profile pictures would be quite cool. Thinking about it a bit more, there are three problems with building such a service:
- A lot of these sites you will need to crawl programmatically using some kind of web-crawler library. It will be a pain to write, and even bigger pain whenever they change anything in the HTML layout of their pages.
- Some sites have specific and/or strange restrictions for image dimensions, file size, and even file format.
- Will people actually trust such a service with passwords for all of their online social networking accounts?
The later problem, trust, is definitely the biggest one. And I'm not sure you could overcome it unless the service is officially sponsored and/or operated by Google or somebody. I do think it could be a fun project to undertake, but I think it's pretty doomed right from the start unfortunately. Although if I updated my profile pictures more than once every 4-5 years, I might just build a prototype for myself at least.
