OnlineLife.com Avatar community Goes Online

2008-10-04 07:40:29 (GMT) (WiredPRNews.com - Technology)

Online Life.com offers a forum for all kinds of interests with customizable avatars and graphics to guide users through the site.

Fort Worth, TX (WiredPRNews.com)—OnlineLife.com offers youth-oriented graphics and avatars to navigate users through forums that cover entertainment, faith, science, sports, politics, music and more.

While the large, cartoonish graphics may appeal to teenage users, the images slow down the navigation from page to page. Each topic has its own byte-heavy graphic image that tends to slow things down. This is especially true on the forums tab, which has gif images ranging from over 9,000 bytes to a more reasonable 1500 to 2000-byte range.

The website bills itself as an ‘Avatar Community Chat Forum’ and it definitely delivers, with an incredible array of user-created avatars that represent the different personalities of those online. From light to dark-skinned characters with every imaginable hairstyle and color, the avatars can be dressed with T-shirts, formal dresses, jeans, sunglasses, electric guitars, purses and more.

The site’s avatar-driven motif attempts to copy the success of Yahoo!, which has a similar set up but with much faster load times and smaller-sized avatars. However, unlike Yahoo.com, Onlinelife.com is more of a gallery of avatars than a content-driven chat room. If I had to wait 10 to 15 seconds for the graphically-heavy pages to download on a T-1 line, then I shudder to think of how long it would take to download on dial-up line during peak usage.

If users choose not to dress-up their avatars with the available inventory of skin tones, hairstyles, clothes and various accessories, they can go with the default avatar, which is a bald, pale and black underwear-clad character that resembles some sort of space alien. Some folks have chosen this option, but all users are required to register with the site before they start chatting in real time. OnlineLife.com also lets users can set up an on-line store and sell virtual items.

http://www.onlinelife.com/

Press Release Keywords: Avatar realtime chat , Avatar realtime community, Real time chat forum

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Jason Meeks · Filed Under Technology