How to Create an Animated Twitter Avatar

Want to stick out in the crowd of avatars on Twitter? Want to catch people's eye as they are scrolling down their tweets, or looking at other people's Followers? Then give an animated avatar a try!

The trick is, however, to find the line between eye-catching and annoyingly distracting. I've seen web cam video used as well as screen recordings. Slide show videos would work as well.

My first attempt was annoyingly distracting, and a Follower asked me to tone it down a bit - which I did. Some people will simply stop following, but that doesn't bother me. I love looking at other people's animations - it's like looking through a virtual window to their soul!

1. If you are going to use a video clip, pull it into a video editing program to grab about 4 seconds worth (Twitter avatars must be under 700 kb). Or create one from scratch, like a slide show video, web cam recording or slide show video. REMEMBER that it will LOOP over and over, so watch to make sure there isn't a jarring jump between the end and the beginning of the video. Windows Movie Maker, the Commercial Creation Center (http://www.CommercialCreationCenter.com) or Camtasia are great creation and editing tools - you just decide which one is easy enough for you to learn quickly. Save the video as a .wmv if you are NOT creating it in Camtasia. You'll see the directions below for how to "produce" it in Camtasia.

2. The most important thing Camtasia will do is produce the video as an animated GIF. If you have Camtasia (there's a free version available), you can do the creating, editing and outputting in there as well. Choose 150 x 112 pixels as the final size, which is the standard thumbnail size. If you don't want to use Camtasia, there is a site that will convert the video to GIF for you (http://www.gifninja.com), but the final file sizes are larger, so you will have to cut your video down even further, possibly to 2 seconds or so.

3. Upload your saved, animated GIF to your Twitter Account Photo. We've seen Firefox give error messages that Twitter is overloaded, but just keep going or switch to another browser. It will take eventually.

Get feedback from your followers about whether or not it is too busy, and refine your photo until you and your favorite followers are happy. But remember, you can't please everyone, so don't bother trying. If you're happy with it, then let yourself enjoy it, and change it around from time to time to break up the monotony.

Create Free Avatars For Facebook Or Twitter - Cartoon Yourself

Often we don't love to put our own pictures in the general photography mode and wish something like creating cartoon pictures of own that actually tells about your inner artistic nature. And this trend is mostly seen in the social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and others. If you too have felt that the pictures are no longer attractive and they won't tell your visitors what you have in your inner mind then switch to the cartoon pictures and make avatars for yourself. It is very much possible to create free avatars for Facebook or Twitter with the help of lots of websites that allow one to create avatar of his or her own in various shades and designs.

The website that enables you to create your own cartoon is called avatar maker and this facility is absolutely free by some popular online websites. Everyday millions of people log into these websites and create their own avatars for pasting the images on social networking site or creating desktop or use them for other purposes. It will not be difficult for you to find an avatar maker over the internet. The moment you search for such a cartoon maker of your image in the internet, hundreds of such site will pop up. But do you think that each and every of these sites are reliable? Perhaps not!

While choosing online sites to create avatar of your image you should be careful too. Because many online websites do allow you the free service but they send files attached with malware and adware to your system which can be hazardous to the health of your computer as well as can be threatening to steal data from your computer. Go for reliable and reputed sites like Meez, Manga, South Park and others for the cartoon character you wish for yourself or friends.