Yahoo! Avatars Review

Yahoo offers many different (helpful and not so helpful) services. Among one of my favorites is the Yahoo Avatar.  Yahoo Avatar is a system that allows you to create your own special picture, that can be downloaded, saved as a jpeg or other image files, or exported directly to blogs. The service can be accessed at avatars.yahoo.com.

Avatars are pictures, images or even animations that you can use to express yourself.  On Yahoo Avatar you choose from among the following:

• appearance: face, eyes, hair color and styles
• clothing: choose from 35 "pages" of different clothing and styles from international to seasonal, denim to dressy; tops, bottoms and even plus sizes
• accessories: 9 pages of hats, bags, jewelry, eye-wear, and scarves with themes including fantasy, history, sports, pets, holidays, causes, patriotism and family
• backgrounds: you can travel the world from the comfort of your computer with these over 50 pages (6 to a page) locals and backgrounds from mountains to the Taj Mahal, take a cruise or cruise the park
• branded items from Gillette Venus, Election 2008 (wear your own shirt proclaiming you are for Obama or McCain), JC Penney, Pepsi, Verizon Wireless, Wii, Yahoo and the Bee Movie.

Can't find what you are looking for? Try the Yahoo Avatar engine. You simply type in the item you are looking for and all the items they have in the category will appear on the page, as well as the categories that they are located in.

You can also add expressions -- the infamous Palin wink, a wave, a smile, or a frown. You can be happy or sad whatever you feel that day as well as express yourself.  You can add some animations, like a wave.

As you make changes your avatar appears on the left hand side of the screen in preview mode. You can save or make changes and then add to your favorites.

My Viewpoint: Yahoo Avatar is a creative and fun way to express yourself.  I like the variety of clothing, backgrounds and accessories.  My complaints are:  there is very little "family" to choose from, mostly just pregnant women or a stroller or holding a baby. For those of us who have more than one child or have older children we can't include it in our avatar scene. The other complaint is that it is very difficult to find out how to download or export and save your avatar for use somewhere else.  It is easily loaded to your Yahoo messenger and other Yahoo services but to use it other places you have to look carefully and jump through a few hoops.

But, if you like to express yourself, want your privacy and don't like to post your photo on your blog, but still want some fun expression of who you are, and you want it to be free, Yahoo Avatar's offers you several options and it's fun. Be all that you want to be or whoever you want to be each day with this easy avatar service.

Note: To save your avatar and use it someplace else follow these instructions:

Save your Yahoo Avatar to your favorites.

On the first page of avatars use the function on the far left hand bottom side that says export.

The next page allows to use either as an export or a download with choices of html coding or download as an image.  Choose your preference, if you are saving it to someplace like Viewpoints, simply save it as a jpeg file.

You then either upload the photo from your computer or copy paste the html coding to someplace like your blog or Myspace.