My Free Avatars

Better than smiley central - cool new MSN emoticons

More Information on Free Avatars

Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace interfaces, an avatar (sometimes AV or av) is an icon or representation of a user in a shared virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs, in computer role-playing games, and shared non-gaming universes such as Active Worlds, There, Second Life, and The Palace.
This definition has recently been applied to online virtual communities and Internet forums in particular, as a picture that a member/user of such a community/forum has elected to display alongside his or her contributions in order to represent him- or herself. Avatars have also become popular in instant messaging, and are sometimes referred to as buddy icons.

The term "avatar" derives from the Sanskrit word Avat?ra which means "descent" and usually implies a deliberate descent into mortal realms for special purposes. The term is used primarily in Hinduism, for incarnations of Vishnu the Preserver, whom many Hindus worship as God. The Dasavatara are ten particular "great" incarnations of Vishnu. The "Golden Avatar" popularly known as Gouranga is said to be the most recent descent.

As used for a computer representation of a user, the term dates at least as far back as 1985, when it was used as the name for the player character in the Ultima series of computer games. The Ultima games started out in 1981, but it was in Ultima IV (1985), that the term "avatar" was introduced. To become the "avatar" was the goal of Ultima IV. The later games assumed that you were the avatar and "avatar" was the player's visual on-screen in-game persona. The on-screen representation could be customized in appearance.

Later, the term "avatar" was used by the designers of the role-playing game Shadowrun (1989), the online role-playing game Habitat (1987) and was popularised by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992), where it was used to describe the virtual simulation of the human form in the Metaverse, a virtual-reality version of the Internet. Social status within the Metaverse was often based on the quality of a user's avatar, as a highly detailed avatar showed that the user was a skilled hacker and programmer while the less talented would buy off-the-shelf models in the same manner a forumer would today. Stephenson has said that he invented this use of the word without knowing somebody else had done it first.

Despite the widespread use of avatars, it is unknown which internet forums were the first to use them. Avatars on Internet forums serve the purpose of representing users and their actions, personalizing their contributions to the forum, and may represent different parts of their persona or social status in the forum.

The traditional avatar system used on most Internet forums is a small (100x100 pixels, for example) square-shaped area close to the user's forum post, where the avatar is placed. Some forums allow the user to upload an avatar image that may have been designed by the user or acquired from elsewhere. Other forums allows the user to select an avatar from a preset list or use an auto-discovery algorithm to extract one from the user's homepage.

Other avatar systems exist, such as on Gaia Online, where a pixelized representation of a person or creature is used, which can then be customized to the user's wishes.

AOL Instant Messenger was the first popular instant-messaging program to use avatars, picking up on the idea from PC games. However, users of AIM and many other IM services commonly refer to avatars as buddy icons. Today, many popular instant-messaging programs use avatars, including MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

Other sites with free avatars:

http://avatars.jurko.net/ – Free desktop avatars. Cool, best images, pictures.

http://www.allavatars.com/ – Free avatars and free buddy icons for download - All Avatars - custom, artist-created avatars and buddy icons for free download.

http://www.entity.cc/free-avatars.php – Avatars and Free Avatar. Always Free. View or Download and view free avatars with various color backgrounds with online resizing.

http://www.unoriginal.co.uk/coolstuff.html – Free Avatars and Avatar Sets:. Whether you need one avatar for yourself, or are looking to add a gallery of avatars to your forums or message boards