Google Authorship Photo Not Showing ANSWERED

Just gotta a tip from my younger friend via Facebook that His and Mine Google Authorship photo is not appearing in search engine results page (SERP). So, I immediately made a search by picking up few lines of blog posts as keywords to ensure to see my blog posts on first positions in serp. As always the blog posts came up in search result but unluckily as my friend pointed my authorship image didn't come along with articles, but my Google+ name with link and number of circles are still available at their position in rich snippets.

The absence of authorship image really made me upset because I was unable to understand why Google removed my authorship? So, I quickly decided to make similar searches for some known bloggers and soon I realized I'm not the only one facing this mishap. But the main questions are:

1. Is there anything wrong with my markup?
2. Is there any technical error in Google's system?
3. Or Once again Google found a new way to tease bloggers (:D)

I had a suspect that my image is not showing because I have customized my Google plus url recently and forget to modify it in blog source code. To check either my markup is placed correctly and working or not, I decide to use Google Structured Data Testing Tool and end up with results that I have a successfully established authorship for my blogs. It means there is nothing wrong with my markup placement.

The answer of 2nd question mentioned above was very well given by +Ashley Berman Hale one of the Top Contributor in Google's Webmaster Forum, posted in GPF. She said,

It's not really a problem or error.

Google won't show all applicable rich snippets in the SERPs - even if you have set it up perfectly. They get to experiment with what they show > and they will make adjustments to determine what to show constantly. Before a lot of people used Authorship, it was easier to get selected. Now they are limiting that to those that are considered higher quality/authority. 

Google is constantly experimenting with the SERPs. Again, this doesn't mean that there is an error.

For the 3rd question on Googling I landed on a new blog post in which +Barry Schwartz made a announcement that Matt Cutts (head of Google's WebSpam team) has confirmed him that they rolled out a new update in which they withdraw approximately 15% rich snippets from serps for thin quality websites.

Ok! that's make sense but would You (Google) bother to tell us what is high and low quality website in your eyes. If I'm not wrong than the PageRank is the algorithm which you guys used to tell importance of any website in your big G eyes. If so, then recently on 6th December 2013 unexpectedly the PageRank updated and my both blogs got their first rankings PR2 (Bloggeristan.com) and PR4 directly from PR N/A. If you also want author should be authoritative in order to show up his cute face in search results then I admit that I'm too far from authoritative personalities on Google plus in numbers but at-least I have 1900+ followers with roughly 32:1 ratio of followers and following. And on the other hand I will not pin point someone but I just saw blogs with lesser PR and very thin content and low traffic and those are coming in results with their author photos. Even author stats are quite much low in comparison to mine and their profiles feed also didn't get updated since from months.

I would like to also mention that I have two friends both from Pakistan are coming in search results with rich snippets on their one blog, but on their other PR4 and PR3 blogs with handsome traffic their and blog writers faces also not appearing in search. So it may be possible that Google has rolled out a new Headache for bloggers as Site-wide Google Authorship penalty.

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Well I'm not sure what exactly Google wants to do but this seems annoying. So I've planned few experiments in coming days to crack the exact definition used by Google to scale any person or website as authority with good quality content to decide to show rich snippets in search results with photos.