Emoticons Are The New Emotions On Facebook

By Author: Jai Prakash Srivastava
Total Articles: 301
Comment this article

Facebook, the popular social networking site, has become an indisputable aspect of people's everyday lives. Launched in the beginning of 2004, Facebook is used by people to create their profiles and keep in touch with their friends and acquaintances with regular updates of their personal and professional lives.
Facebook has attracted users with its simple and clean design structure. Just like Facebook, the Facebook emoticons have become essential to enhance the users' experience on their Facebook lives. Emoticons are the smileys and icons used for conversions and chats on Facebook. Facebook provides various emoticons starting with the original and the most common used ones. These include a smiling face - :- ) and a sad face - :- ( and a winking face - ;- )
When Facebook decided to begin its chat section as an add-on communication tool, everyone wondered if Facebook was diverting from its original concept. The Facebook chat was kept simple and just for the purpose of chatting and communicating unlike other chat programs that had a diverse and complex set of actions and services alongside chatting.
Facebook ...
... introduced its own emoticons, which are simple and easy to remember by the users. For instance, if a user wants to draw a monkey on the chat, a simple combination of- :|] would work. The shortcuts on the keyboard for the symbols are simple and the users have a fun time either discovering them accidentally or searching for them over the web.
Plenty of smileys and icons can be used on Facebook for different purposes. As the regular smileys used on most of the chat programs, get boring after a time, a new combination of emoticons always catches interests of the users on Facebook. Apart from the basic smiley, some of the most popular icons on Facebook are the heart symbol for lovers, the pacman symbol to keep alive the nostalgic theme of the 80s, the Penguin emoticon for something that the user thinks as adorable and cute.
Facebook symbols are largely Unicode- encoded. These are designed to include special characters and characters that appear in most of the languages. Widely used Facebook text symbols include money currency symbols, circled Chinese signs, weather, religion, gender, love, zodiac signs, pointers, copyright, quotes, music, flower, snow, star, chess, and hands. The text symbols on Facebook can be created using two techniques, either by using alt codes or by copying the Unicode signs and symbols.
The smileys and icons are considered extremely necessary in the digital world of communication. These have evolved from simple arrangements of characters to stable images and now to 3-D smileys and icons. These have helped users to express their sarcasm, anger, playfulness, cheerfulness, and bashfulness while communicating with their friends online. On the status update of Facebook, the user can type up to 420 characters. The less one types on the status update section, the fresher it looks. Longer information on the status bar might get your readers bored. Add notes if you want to extend your information.
Find more information relating to characters, and special characters here.