Are you tired of uploading your avatar on every new social web thing over and over again? I am, and it seems that most Zootool users are too. Only a few are uploading their pictures in Zootool which makes the list of featured Zootool users on the homepage pretty ridiculous looking, and finding new contacts is somehow difficult with the default avatar everywhere around.

A few weeks ago, when I saw the “import friends” feature on pownce, I thought that it would be awesome to have something similar for avatars. Gravatar is a great approach to global avatars you can take everywhere with you, but the system is pretty much limited to blogs and I haven’t seen very much social platforms using this. The great thing is that almost every major community is hosting a simple API to provide information about their users’ profiles. So I had a closer look at the API documentation of Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Youtube and Vimeo and in all cases it was super simple to get the url of the avatar by username. Facebook and MySpace offer much more complicated APIs, so I skipped them temporarily. All you’ve got to do now, when you already own an account on one of these platforms, is to insert your username, hit the import button and see the magic happen! To import your picture simply click on your current avatar or go to the board > your picture