BuddyPress.org

I wouldn’t expect what you have above to work ‘title’ is the link name the character text for the anchor ‘href’ is the actual link href  and there are  few other parts one can manipulate in this way however looking at admin-bar.php seems to suggest ‘title’ is a little more confusing than suggested by the WP codex.

I would look at admin-bar.php around  line 140 on  to see how WP add the user avatar.