The Secret Life of Emoticons

According to a recent Yahoo! survey of 40,000 Yahoo! Messenger* users, 82 percent use emoticons in their IM conversations. I must hang out with the other 18 percent. To date, my weblife has been fairly devoid of emoticons with the exception of the occasional grin.

Nerd Times says that it was Kevin McKenzie who first used the -) to mean tongue in cheek way back in 1979. A few years later, Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University realized that some people had no ear for humor on the web. He wanted to create a symbol to let people know that something was said in jest. He suggested -) to show pleasure (or indicate a joke) and :-( to show displeasure. It caught on. Get the story from the horse's mouth by visiting Scott Fahlman's home page.

Emoticons are used for a lot more than humor these days. The Yahoo! survey found that 83 percent of respondents say that "happiness" is one of the two emotions they express most often using emoticons. "Flirting" is the second. More than half felt that love is easier to convey using emoticons than in person—57 percent of respondents would rather tell a "crush" their true feelings using an emoticon. Ten percent of respondents would go as far as proposing marriage to their loved one via IM.

Not everything is better said via messaging, though. The survey found that men and women both agree that telling someone "things aren't working out" or "we should break up" is better said face to face.

As for memory retention, get this: 66 percent of Yahoo! Messenger users have memorized the text characters for three or more emoticons. Nineteen percent of respondents have memorized more than 10.

The most avid emoticoners are between the ages of 19 and 25 (68 percent use emoticons daily). But nearly half (48 percent) of respondents over the age of 50 used them every day as well. I was surprised to hear that.

Originally you had two variations on the theme: emoticons and smileys. Emoticons are those funny symbols you create with special keystrokes. The creations look like stick figures of facial expressions or a body (though you have to look pretty hard at some of them to "get it." >-) is an evil grin, for example and :'-) is happy, but crying. Smileys, like the yellow happy face we're all so tired of looking at, are a bit more sophisticated, using graphic symbols rather than keystrokes.

Today emoticons have gotten pretty elaborate. You can download extras from the web. They come in 3D, they dance and sing, recite messages, and can look almost photographic. But they should also bring unease to users. A number of studies conducted by Internet security firms conclude that adware and spyware can often come from downloading things like screensavers and emoticons.

The best guarantee for emoticons free of adware or spyware is to get them right from your service providers (for free). Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and even Google Gmail have their own emoticons and smileys for popping into an chat or IM. They are not always guaranteed to display properly on other systems though.

There are hundreds of third party companies in the emoticon business as well. SweetIM, myemoticons, and Smiley Central each have an incredible selection (myemoticons tends towards the raunchier, Smiley Central has an abundance of yellow smilers, and SweetIM actually looks relatively sophisticated). All are totally animated, many have sounds, and the sites have thousands of them for free use with AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! SweetIM can also be an add-on tool bar for Internet Explorer; this allows you to add an emoticon to any web based application: blogs, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.

No matter how popular emoticons are, I'm not sure if these perpetual motion, jumping, kissing, crying, or heart throbbing blobs express the real me. They always remind me of Mexican jumping beans. And I'm always a bit worried about the darker side of the smiley world, as in adware and spyware. How about you? Do you speak emoticon?

*The survey was conducted as part of a celebration of 25 years of emoticons. In 2002, Yahoo! Messenger was the first major IM service to incorporate emoticons. You can join in their contest to design a new emoticon.

* Yahoo! Tech is owned by Yahoo!, which also owns Yahoo! Messenger.