DoppelMe:
The Free Dynamic Avatar Maker

With DoppelMe you can create a cool graphical likeness of yourself, your friends, family or any group of people for use
as an avatar in forums, instant messenger, blogs and almost anywhere else on the web.

It’s free and there are no Flash, ActiveX controls, downloads or toolbars needed – just
your browser and a few mouse clicks. That’s it!

. . . and it really is that easy. You select your preferred gender (only two choices are offered here, though I keep hearing there are more options…) and then choose from a variety of expressions, hair, eyewear, hats, tops, bottoms, shoes, extras & accessories.

You can also have a colored or transparent background. It’s amazing how much individuality a few choices can provide — though you can have only one avatar per account, you can keep changing how it looks.

Doppel then gives you the HTML code to pull the image from their site, or you can simply right-click and save to your own server.

They also provide different sizes and versions for different purposes:

. . . and you can add these to your email signature on Yahoo Mail, MS Outlook, or Hotmail.

So, it doesn’t talk, or move, or aggregate your profiles — but it’s still pretty cool. I could see using it on a sidebar, for example, linked to your About Page.

Do click through, just to see how flexible this tool really is.

Thanks to Google Blogoscoped for the pointer.