MyTabstart > Favorites Directory > Technology > How Do You Feel Today Faces
When you want to show someone how you're feeling today using a picture of a smiley face, you use an emoticon. The word emoticon is a combination of "emotion" and "icon", as in a computer icon. Many email and instant messaging programs recognize the shorthand for these faces and will automatically put a colorful image in the place of your keystrokes. So, for example, a colon typed next to a semicolon becomes a winking face once the user hits the enter key.
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Use smiley faces in Gmail and GChat - This is an overview of how you can use faces in Google products to show how you're feeling.
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Smiley faces for Yahoo messenger - If you don't feel like writing about how you're feeling today, let some of these faces do the talking for you.
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Options for emoticons on MSN - Do not miss the more creative ones that aren't faces at all, like the birthday cake or the island with a palm tree.
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Show your feelings today in any program - This comes from Netlingo and is an unofficial exhaustive dictionary of how to use traditional emoticons.
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Anime emoticons - Beyond the traditional yellow smiley faces, many users now also use anime versions of the traditional faces. One that is new to me is "z_z" which is used to show that you're feeling sleepy today.
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Wikipedia - Since they are so ominous today, it's hard to remember that our parents lived without computers. You would have assume that they also must have lived without typed smiley faces. However, according to Wikipedia, the practice of using typed faces to express how the typer feels predates the computer. Apparently teletype operators would use them in the 1970s.
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Scott Fahlman, one inventor of the smiley face - In this post Scott gives his recollection of why he started using smiley faces to show how he was feeling in bulletin board messages in the 1980's. Since sarcasm was lost on many in those early days before email, he suggested using the character combination ":-)" when something was intended to be funny. He also humbly points out that he may certainly not have been the first person to come up with the idea, even though today he is frequently cited as the inventor.