pavatar.com - Make and Host Your Avatar

Pavatar, which stands for “Personal Avatar”, allows you to design your own personalized avatar for all of your online interactions. It is felt that personal avatars can help you to maintain your privacy while at the same time representing your unique personality in a fun way. Unlike competing site Gravatar.com, which hosts your unique avatar for you, Pavatar actually has you do the hosting. The reason for this is that by hosting your own avatar, you don’t have to worry about third-party server issues causing your avatar to be unavailable. With Pavatar you simply upload your avatar and they then provide you with the code that you can paste into your blog or website. This stops you from having to sign in to a different site every time you are online just to get start your avatar up.

“The Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) is a personal picture hosted on your webspace which is then used by websites to display whenever referring to content provided by YOU, the user. An example would be if you made a comment or a site posting where an avatar is required. This way, delivering your Personal Avatar is peripheral and can be (nearly) anonymous. This option inhibits companies from collecting personal information about your habits on the web.”

This site should be especially appealing to the geekier side of the spectrum who are concerned about their avatar not being available 24-7 and would like to host it by themselves.

Have they considered also offering a hosted solution so that the millions of people who don’t have a blog or website could take advantage of the service as well?