Pixels: Emoticons or Smileys

When communicating over the Internet important non verbal information is missed. Emoticons provides an incredible way of showing off your mood and real intentions – some times it’s sufficient just to put a smiley in your post at a board (a picture says more than a thousand words…).

In the early beginnings people were using plain ASCII to portray their emotions, which narrowed things down when it came to what they could express. Disregarding the most obvious (tilt your head to the left!), like : ) ; ) and : ( you would have to know the person you were "talking" to well to understand what he or she were trying to say. What do you for instance make of this one? :-.) You’ll find a neat list of ASCII smilies at Netlingo.

Using fancy applications like PSP or Photoshop and gif animators, most people can make their own smilies, and the net is crowded with smiley websites. When using webmail or browsing a board there’s often a default package of smilies which can be put into posts or mail by a simple click. We’ve also had great fun using SmileyPad, a neat program that collects the URLs of images you find on the Internet, allowing you to put them into blog entries, forum posts and emails by a simple drag and drop action. The SmileyPad site has since gone offline, but as previous moderators on their support forum we’re allowed to continue distributing it, see link at the bottom of the page. It is totally free, and in contradiction to most other smiley software out there, it is also 100% spy- and adware free..!