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GoAnimate is a new site where you can create your own animations. Unlike similar sites that merely allow you to make comic strips with few animation options and custom design capabilities, GoAnimate has a more complete set of features for tailoring any animation to your liking. When beginning, you can start from scratch or use one of GoAnimate’s template designs. Add scenes to your animation just as you would for a video clip.

There’s a pretty wide variety of characters you can use for your animation clip and they’re are all customizable. You can even place a photograph of your face over a character for an added comedic touch (think Elf-Yourself). To make things easy, you can search Flickr or your Facebook account for images. You can also add other media, such as sounds, music and your voice, to make your animation look more professional.

Animations are shareable across a variety of social networking and social bookmarking sites, as well as embeddable, so it’s easy enough to create viral content from your GoAnimate account, though I’m somewhat surprised to see YouTube missing from the distribution “share” list. What I find particularly interesting about GoAnimate’s site and business model is the fact that the team behind GoAnimate has also forged some deals with licensed animated content so that it can be used by animation creators on the site, and shared across the Web. This introduces some marketing potential on the part of many animators, both well-known and independent, not to mention other brands that would like to partake in user-generated animations as well.

Bringing such creation tools to the average Web user is part of a larger trend we’re seeing across a number of Flash-based spaces, including games and multimedia content-sharing from companies like EA Games. As such media becomes further integrated into the social media sites we already frequent, monetization will encourage even more feature development to simplify the creation and sharing process.