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 Sub Categories | Avatar's for Chat Rooms, Forums and Online Communities
NOTE: This category refers to avatar images for forums, online communities, and chat rooms. For 3D rooms please see our section on Avatar Chat Rooms The term "avatar" can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user. This sense of the word "Avatar" was coined by Neal Stephenson in the 1992 novel Snow Crash, who co-opted it from the Sanskrit word avatara, which is a concept similar to that of incarnation. However, the use of the term "avatar" for the on-screen representation of the user was coined in 1985 by Chip Morningstar and Joseph Romero in designing LucasFilm's online role-playing game Habitat. Despite the widespread use of avatars, it is unknown which Internet forums were the first to use them; the earliest forums did not include avatars as a default feature, and they were included in unofficial "hacks" before eventually being made standard. 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, beliefs, interests or social status in the forum.
In 1995, KeepTalking, a product of UNET2 Corporation, was one of the first companies to implement an avatar system into their web chat software. In 1995, Cybertown first introduced three dimensional avatars to internet chat.[citation needed] In 1996 Microsoft Comic Chat, an IRC client that used cartoon avatars for chatting, was released. Some avatars are animated, consisting of a sequence of multiple images played repeatedly. In such animated avatars, the number of images as well as the time in which they are replayed vary considerably. America Online invented instant messaging for its membership in 1996 and introduced a limited number of "buddy icons," picking up on the avatar idea from PC games. When AOL later introduced the free version of its messenger, AIM, for use by anyone on the Internet, the number of icons offered grew to be more than 1,000 and the use of them grew exponentially, becoming a hallmark feature of instant messaging.
Another avatar based system is one wherein an image is automatically generated based on the identity of the poster. Identicons are formed as visually distinct geometric images derived from a digest hash of the poster's IP address. In this way, a particular anonymous user can be uniquely identified from session to session without the need for registration or authentication. Avatar Pictures - Articles and Reviews
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An avatar is a computer user's representation of him or herself in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, or a two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and chat room communities. 
Flat GIF based avatars were introduced by such programs as Virtual Places as early as 1994 along with VOIP capabilities which were later abandoned for lack of bandwidth.
Yahoo's instant messenger was the first to adopt the term "avatar" for its icons. Today, many other popular instant-messaging services support the use of avatars, including Windows Live Messenger, and services using the XMPP protocol such as Google Talk, LJ Talk, and Gizmo5.
