Avatars are not to be confused with emoticons. Emoticons express feeling, but avatars express who you are. Avatars are found in just about every chat room, or forum on the Internet. Read on to learn more about them, and a few words of advice about why it is important to download avatars with caution.

Hindu Avatar Meaning
When you think of avatars you might think of little graphics of people on places like Yahoo chat or MSN. Avatars can be people or even abstracts of designs too. The word avatar comes from the Hindu belief of the immortality of a super human, so in a way the avatars on the Internet fulfill that meaning in a light hearted way. You can get free avatars that are funny avatars or serious ones, and even animated avatars too.

Avatar Warning
You can get avatars from downloading on the numerous sites on the Internet. You should be aware that avatars on some sites come with a serious problem. Free avatar images are great to have, but when malware is downloaded to your computer it can wreck havoc on your system. You can loose vitally important data, and it can cost a hunk of change to have the system crash totally restored so you can get back online. It does not matter what type of avatars you download, free animated avatars with spyware and malware, will damage if infected.

Check Avatar Use
You can use avatars just about anywhere, as long as the forum allows it. There are approved avatars for places like My Space with MySpace avatars. MSN avatars are cool avatars too. When you download a free avatar from any of the avatar galleries that are online, make sure that it is approved. Some types are not approved for certain forums, or chat areas because of legalities, and some find certain more adult like avatars very offensive too. You can loose your privileges from a website if you do not respect the guidelines set up by it.

Avatars can be designed by a professional, created by you with the right software, or downloaded from a website on the Internet. However you want to get your avatars is your decision, but make sure that when you do download get a clean one. Use the software the way it is intended to be use, and collect them all. Have fun with avatars because you can share with others for a lot more fun.