#080808 was a meme that made some headway across different platforms, with Flickr doing their own 888 campaign and of course all of the Twitter fanfare, but since I’ve begun microblogging I’ve never seen a meme take hold like #mangavatar.

I first heard about it on Twitter when I was Hahloing through my timeline on a Friday evening, noticing that most of my friends had recently changed their avatars to cartoon manga characters. As it turns out, chatter on Twitter about mangavatars goes as far back as three months ago (according to Twitter Search) when Mystiria (@mystiria) uploaded her new avatar and tweeted about it to her friends.

The site everyone is using is called Face Your Manga, and it allows users to select from an assortment of different features and accessories to create a manga replica of themselves.

The phenomenon seemed to hit the mainstream microblogging communities only recently as now is when I’ve seen the most real-life photographs being exchanged for Japanese manga cartoons with similar likenesses.

To me, one of the most interesting things about this meme is that it transcended the borders of the different microblogging platforms, affecting users not only on Twitter, but also on Pownce, Identi.ca, Kwippy and Rejaw to name a few.

Part of the proliferation for this meme could be due to services like Ping.fm, which allows users to post to multiple microblogging platforms at once, but I also believe that people are just becoming more active across multiple platforms. With multi-posting microblogging services, its easy to transpose your message from one site to the next, but there’s no easy process for updating avatars in profiles.

What this means is that if a user wanted to update their profile to participate in the meme, they would need to login to their account and upload the photo. Depending on the number of sites being used, this could take an awful lot of work. However, the beauty of memes is that they are effortless to participate in and even easier to pass along. All it would take is for one user with several followers to update his avatar across a few platforms and to post about the idea and the meme could take off like wildfire.

For mangavatars, that seems to be the exact course of action. I’ve got no idea how long the mangavatars will last, but it’ll be interesting to see when the next cross-platform meme will crop up.