The sunglasses or ‘cool’ emoticon is unique, because it can tell people that either you are feeling good, or they are looking good. I’m not convinced which one is the default meaning for the cool smiley, but I tend to use it infrequently so i think that it probably means something special.

Chat smileys

Finally, my favourite is the wide smile smiley! On MSN the wide smile is and it has become my ‘default’ smile. In fact, the normal smiley on MSN and Yahoo Chat is kind of weak compared to the big mouth guy. I only ever use the small mouth smiley if I want the person to think that I am smiling but NOT very enthusiastic! Weird huh? I’ll check in more later on and talk about my other favourite chat smileys!

What do they all have in common? Chat emticons of course! They’re a way of communicating with other people, without having to find the exact word or phrase every time. Sometimes I like to have whole conversations with my friends and ONLY use emoticons!

I first started using emoticons when I was 16. We used AOL at home (my mum got it free from her job at a bank) so we would log on and use their AIM chat program. It was revolutionary! I remember some early chatroom software also used emoticons, but chat slowly died out to be replaced with IM. I think that chat might have been a bit too dangerous or something. Anyway, instant messengers were the future, and emoticons changed with them.

MSN is the world leader in chat, and their emoticons are known all over the world. The wink, the shades guy…all of them are completely synonymous with chatting. Facebook chat has recently brought in a lot of emoticons, but I’m not sure whether they will take off because of their ease of use. We’ll see.

Anyway, I hope I can keep you informed about chat emoticons and smileys – we’ll see!