America Online invented quick messaging for its membership in 1996 and introduced a limited quantity of “Buddy Icons,” picking up on the avatar idea from PC games. When AOL later released the free version of its messenger, AIM, for use by anyone on the Internet, the number of icons offered grew to be a lot more than 1,000 as well as the use of them grew exponentially, becoming a hallmark feature of instantaneous messaging. In 2002, AOL launched “Super Buddies,” 3D animated icons that talked to users as they typed messages and read messages. The term Avatar began to replace the moniker of “buddy icon” as 3D customizable icons became recognized to its users from the mainstream popularity of PC Games. Yahoo’s fast messenger was the first to adopt the term “avatar” for its icons. These days, numerous other popular instant-messaging providers support the use of avatars, including Windows Live Messenger, and services using the XMPP protocol for instance Google Talk, LJ Talk, and Gizmo5.

Quick messaging avatars are typically extremely small., AIM icons, have been as small as 16×16 pixels but utilised much more commonly at the 48×48 pixels size, although several icons may be discovered online that typically measure anywhere from 50×50 pixels to 100×100 pixels in size. A wide variety of these imaged avatars could be found on web websites and common eGroups for example Yahoo! Groups.

The latest use of avatars in instantaneous messaging is dominated by dynamic avatars. The user chooses an avatar that represents him while chatting and, by way of using text to speech technology, enables the avatar to talk the text being employed at the chat window. An additional form of use for this kind of avatar is for video chats/calls. Some providers, for example Skype (by means of some external plugins) enable users to use talking avatars during video calls, replacing the image from the user’s camera with an animated, talking avatar.

American Online started to use Aim Buddy Icons as a marketing tool, recognized as “Expressions,” for music, movies, and personal computer games in 2001. Since then quite a few advertising firms have too.