Zwinky
Dress up a big-headed cartoon version of yourself, paste it on your MySpace, then wander Zwinktopia earning Zbucks for new outfits. Zwinky was the avatar craze of the mid-2000s — and, thanks to the browser toolbar it came bundled with, the thing that got a lot of family computers a stern talking-to.
Zwinky launched on June 20, 2006, from IAC's consumer-applications unit, the group that later became Mindspark Interactive Network and was already responsible for Smiley Central and Cursor Mania. The pitch was simple: build a customized avatar from what TechCrunch reported as 10,000 outfits, accessories and other items, and embed it on other sites, MySpace above all. By March 2007 the company was claiming 20 million active toolbars and 4.7 million unique visitors for the month, and that April it opened Zwinktopia, a virtual world where your avatar could roam, chat with other users and earn Zbucks, the currency for buying virtual clothes and goods. The whole "Fun Web Products" group was pulling in over $100 million a year, and Zwinky got its own TV commercials.
The catch was the toolbar. Using Zwinky meant installing it, and Mindspark's toolbars were commonly classified as potentially unwanted programs, installed without the user's clear consent and difficult to remove; Wikipedia's summary is that many "exhibited malicious behaviors and could be considered malware." That reputation is as much a part of the memory as the avatars: the parent or school IT person discovering what had been installed, and the kid insisting it was just for the outfits.
On August 26, 2016, the Zwinky Twitter account announced that "Zwinky has decided to close its virtual doors." Mindspark itself wound down in 2021. What survives is the aesthetic — the paper-doll proportions and the glittery MySpace-era layouts they were made for — and a lot of people who can still remember exactly what their Zwinky was wearing.
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