Tag: EMOTICONS

Live Messenger has now been around for ten years and is being used by more than 330 million people worldwide. Well done, Live Messenger team! To celebrate, Microsoft has put together a free download containing emoticons, winks, backgrounds, and other Messenger extras. To see whether or not this was postable, I downloaded both Live Messenger and the pack and installed them. When you click the ...

Are you leaving work early to fly off somewhere with your sweetie? You could Tweet that to your followers on Twitter, or you could tell them, "I'm going to ? out of work early today and hop a ? to Montego Bay with my true ♥." Adding symbols to Tweets used to involve remembering a whole bunch of keystroke combinations but thanks to TwitterKeys, created by the folks at The Next Web Blog, all ...

There must be something in the water over at Mountain View, because it seems that a day doesn't pass without at least a few significant Google updates. Today we've got enhanced emoticons in Gmail chat, support for group chats, and the company's also experimenting with the idea of letting users vote on search results. The first update is pretty self explanatory. Pretty much every instant messaging ...

The New York Times ran a lengthy article on emoticons this weekend. It's a must read for anyone who can decipher this symbol ~(_8^(I), or for anyone who can't but would like to. While the Times gives a brief history of the emoticon, with the first modern usage traced back to 1982, the juicy bits involve the creep of emoticons from casual conversations into the professional arena. For example, if ...

If emoticons are so 10 minutes ago for you and you like to express yourself through graphics, Zlango might be your new language of choice. Zlango is a graphical language with over 200 icons consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. The colors are bright and fun and the icons themselves are witty - especially if you compare them to their smiley face replacements. Right now, you can use Zlango ...

The latest post at the Ask.com blog begins, "For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters." This is a promising start--I've occasionally been annoyed by the fact that Google interprets almost all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces--but then things go off ...