One Business Worse than Mahalo.com – Avatars!

Posted by Howard
on August 17th, 2008

Nerds (I mean it in the nicest of ways this one time)…take down your Avatars!

Yesterday, it seemed like a lot of people I follow were switching to a new Avatar as their picture. Avatar love shows up once in a while in the consumer side of the internet and each time there is great hope and promise. To be clear about my take on Avatars…MAHALO holds more promise.

I don’t mind seeing an Avatar in my securities testing and at all the other dumbass places I have to take tests to renew some useless particular license. In fact, it’s a good business I am sure. But, as it relates to the social and communicative web…ditch ‘em. Don’t we all have a billion ways to take and manipulate a ‘REAL’ DIGITAL PHOTO?

Rant aside, there are a few things really are wrong with the consumer use of Avatars that may salvage a consumer opportunity (Note – nothing will salvage MAHALO ):

1. the Name – Avatar is a dumb word in the era of the social web.

2. the owner designs it

Off the top of my head, just about any name would work better than Avatar, but that does not solve the real problem…you should not be allowed to design your own picture unless you toooook it!

A photo/picture speaks 1,000 words but an Avatar says – THIS IS WHAT I LOOK LIKE TO ME! Wrong.

To have a prayer of a chance once the industry designs a proper word, your ‘compter caraciture’ must be designed by somebody else (hopefully a talented artist who spends more than one minute churning it out) if not your community of friends and followers. Not you!

Don’t make me unfollow you!

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