Sunday Funnies: Emoticon War

Communicating via instant messaging or text alone has challenges. You don’t get to read the body language or see the telling smirk on the other person’s face. And so emoticons were born — a shorthand code to help inject text messages with emotions. And thank god — without them this entire video would be irrelevant. 

Enjoy this week’s Sunday Funny: Emoticon War. Read more

IMBooster Public Beta Invitation

IMBooster launched Public Beta this week, announcing that registrations will be open until a maximum of 4000 beta testers subscribe.

IMBooster is an add-on for Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger that extends those programs with new avatars, winks, nudges and emoticons. 

If you’d like to be part of the beta test program, you must be one of the first 4000 to sign-up at http://beta.iminent.com/

Customizing the Animated Emoticons in MSN Messenger 6

MSN Messenger 6 introduced the ability to add your own, user-defined emoticons. Unfortunately, they don’t currently allow you to send animated images. You can specify an animated image as your custom emoticon, but MSN Messenger will only display the first frame of the animation.

MSN Messenger 6 does have eleven built-in animated emoticons, and with a little effort on your part, you can replace them with your own animation. Read more

Emoticons & Smileys

What are Emoticons or Smileys?

Emoticons (called “smileys” by some programs) are a combination of symbols to form an icon that helps express emotion. For example, when you string together a colon, a hyphen and a right-parenthesis, you’re expressing a smile. If you look at it sideways, it even looks like a smile!

Why use emoticons?

Instant messaging and chat are very informal methods of communicating, and it is common to use acronyms, abbreviations and emoticons to help keep the conversation flowing smoothly.

Of course, one of the biggest obstacles in communication by written language alone is that you don’t have the benefit of hearing the tone of the other person’s voice, or seeing their body language. Those aural and visual cues help you discern between sincerity and sarcasm; humor and anger. Emoticons give you a way to add those “cues” back into the conversation.

Some instant messaging and chat programs will convert your emoticons into a graphic that makes the emotion even more clear. The following table shows some of the more commonly used emoticons, how you type them, and what they look like in the most popular instant messaging programs.

Coming soon…