With all my recent love of avatars, it is only fair we take a look at possible alternatives in the avatar space.

YearBookYourself

YearBookYourself seems to be good alternative and certainly a novel idea. I feel it's better than most since it actually uses a photo of yourself. No more people asking who's that cartoon on your FaceBook or Twitter.

You can chose between different looks over the years from 1950 to 2000 to retro yourself up.

If you have any Photoshop skills at all you could totally do this yourself, but they do make it pretty simple for the average person.

One thing that did turn me off of it was that it seems more advertisement than content. YearBookYourself was intended to promote Taubman shopping center properties and push users to modern day retailers according to their press release.

But if you don't mind the soft sell you can get a nifty retro avatar to pimp around.

Planetcreation

Doppleme

DoppelMe offers up cutesy Mii'ish avatars. A very nice selection of colours for everything from eyes, hair, clothing to shoes. Though they do skew to the pastel once applied. One major downside, you are required to create an account if you want full access to all the pieces to create your avatar.

grantalias a la manga

And who can forget my current favorite FaceYourManga. Check out my pervious post for all the details.

But with any meme there are it's detractors.

StopTheManga is a direct spoof of FaceYourManga site and is trying to put an end to the Mangatar up rising. All in good fun of course.

StopTheManga

Though I think it's only a matter of time till another meme knocks off FaceYourManga. Currently, YearBookYourself is gaining tracktion with the online trend setters and who knows what's around the corner.

How many of you have jumped on the avatar bandwagon? Who feels inspired and who's sharpening their pointy sticks for the coming battle with the mangatars?

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grantalias a la manga

Following as I do the technorati I've got the inside line on the next internet meme and it's FaceYourManga.

Very similar to the South Park or Simpsons creators of yore. Or think Mii on your Wii.

You get a plethora of options to design your avatar and background and even add text to your clothing (which is one letter short for grantalias).

For 1,50€ you can even buy your avatar in a "digital file" to brand your site. It would be nice though to know what the resolution was before buying. Of course I think the majority of people will be very happy with the low resolution copy they get.

A great little service for people who were not lucky enough to get a personalized animated version of themselves.

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me as I would look like as an American

Listening to the lastest BOL (RE:689, Hi JOMOTO, <3 the show) it turns out that the creators of South Park are tired of illegally downloading their own show so they have setup South Park Studios where you can stream all 12 seasons.

Sorry Canada

Downside? South Park Studios is geolocked to the good old US of A only.
Bad enough they had to invade us in the movie, but now this. Though the site does seem to suggest that it's "coming soon". Oh well, par for the course.

Upside? The other 6 billion of us can at least use the Avatar Creator. Though the Simpsons avatar creator is much better than the South Park one.

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Over on the official Simpson's movie site you can create your very own Simpson avatar. If you want to save it for future use you need to sign up. But you can always just download it if you don't want to.

And to think I used to get paid to do this on Pig City I. And don't even get me started on the number of trees I killed making model packs.

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