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Skype makes you a monster, perhaps; but a young and beautiful monster!

Apparently, Skype users are jealous of the "avatars" which you can get on Yahoo. So Skype has provided ways of creating a face for your instant messaging persona - courtesy Klonies. And, weirdly, courtesy Comverse.

The idea is to make your IM look like more a video phone. And just for this summer, there's a football theme, for some reason. At least, that's the official line.

The strange feature of the deal, however, isn't the weird characters, but the player. Comverse is a company normally associated with standard mobile phone carriers - and finding it in bed with Skype and eBay is probably a sign of things to come.

For those who don't use avatars (or even, don't use instant messaging!) it's relatively simple to set up a picture which people see on their screen, when they are swapping banter with you. But it's not all that easy to set up a picture which has facial expressions. Klonies are an attempt to achieve this, but frankly, if you feel they succeed, you're more easily pleased than some.

The Yahoo avatars are all uniformly smooth-faced youthful types with never a sign of middle age. The Skype Klonies are, too; but at least the Klonies include some weird types including a sort of Rasta man, a skating gurly, and

"Using the Klonies Studio in the Skype website, users can create and frequently update their unique Klonie image — changing hairstyles, clothing and accessories, expressions, locations, animated activities and more. Klonies appear as the Skype Caller ID on the screen of the called party, representing how the user would like to be seen, and reflecting the user's appearance, interests, and feelings," said today's announcement. 

"Recent surveys we conducted show that personalization capabilities are important to the Skype community," said Saul Klein, VP Marketing, Skype. "Avatars are a key component of the Skype personalisation strategy.  Klonies are debuting on the Skype site and launching with a "Football Mania" section offering fun and topical content to everyone on Skype."

Exactly how a one-eyed monster with hooves, smoking a pipe and waving six-shooters around can be interpreted as football manic, is probably a question to leave unasked. And what Comverse is doing in bed with Skype, is probably a question that will get answered in due course.

  Tags: Skype, Comverse, Instant Messaging and avatar.