I agree 100% with flipper and a few of the others who say that avatars are out. Personally, I still like avatars, but the web has grown and radically developed itself while bandwith has been radically increased globally too. Avatars were cool when everyone was still concerned about image sizes or when photo sizes were still too big of a deal for online albums and such. These days, most people don't care about those things anymore since only video and music take up wads of bandwidth/server space. see more So, keep it modern and cool, by sticking with the latest stuff like big photos, embedded videos, and song libraries.

On the other hand, for all those who still like the idea of an avatar, why not include that as a toggle on/off switch for each user ... but at much greater size (like the profile photos). That might even generate some pretty cool avatars, when members begin to include/upload large cartoon images from the internet. Could be quite entertaining ...