It can be annoying to upload the same user icon to n* sites. Which makes most users not even bother. The normal steps to upload an Image are as follows.
1. Login
2. Navigate to Profile
3. Select Edit User Icon
4. Browse to the file on the Computer
5. Upload
6. Crop Image
7. Finish
In the best case this can be 7 steps. A simple solution to this would be to allow the user to give a URL or RSS feed.
URL
With the URL, the image could be located on another server, then once the user enters the URL the website server could create a local copy to avoid hot-linking.
In the best case scenario this could get rid of one step (Browse to the file on the Computer). This is a good solution but not a great one. It still requires me to login and change my photo.
RSS
My favorite solution is the RSS solution. Many photo sharing sites (picasa, flickr, zoomr, smugmug,…) provide RSS feeds for a users images. This is an ideal solution for the user icon, because I can login once provide the RSS feed for my photo stream, and that’s it. When I upload a new photo to flickr, then the website can pick that up automatically and display it for me. I no longer need to think about changing my icon.
What’s even better about this solution is if many websites adopt this technique, then I will only have to change my user icon in one place. What a time saver!
