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A Yahoo! Avatar is a character that you can personalize and use when interacting with friends online. By changing hairstyles, clothes, accessories, and backgrounds, you can create your own unique persona. You can show your avatar on Yahoo! Messenger and in other places on Yahoo!.

The system requirements for displaying an avatar on Macintosh are:

Macintosh OSX
Safari 1.3.1 or Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2
Adobe Flash Player 8.0 or higher

You can create and customize your avatar on the Yahoo! Avatars page.

To show your avatar in instant messages and the Messenger List:

Go to the Yahoo! Messenger menu and select Preferences.
Click Display Image.
Click the Avatar box to show your avatar in Messenger.
Select Enable display images everywhere to see pictures and avatars from your contacts.
Select Show other people's Yahoo! Avatars on my Messenger List to see your contacts' avatars.
Close the window.