Smiley Icons: Love Them Or Hate Them

Are you sick to death of smiley icons yet?  A lot of people say that they are, and yet, these little handy characters continue to be wildly popular, and show no signs of going away any time soon.  So what is behind the tremendous popularity of smiley icons online? Let's take a look.

The smiley was invented 25 years ago by early Internet pioneers who discover that, when sending e-mail messages, the intention or tone of their message was often misunderstood.  For example, if someone wrote a sarcastic message, the receiver might be confused, and wonder if the message was meant to be sarcastic or earnest in its intention.

The smiley was born as a way of displaying the emotion behind the words, to reduce the confusion that can sometimes be caused by text messages alone.  The smiley face icon was a huge success almost right from the start, and it wasn't long before the little fellow had company.  Soon there were frowning icons, winking icons and other "emotional icons," or emoticons.

And although many people find smiley icons to be somewhat silly, and wish they would simply vanish from the face of the earth, in reality, they appear to be getting even more popular as time goes by.  How is this possible?

Actually, the answer to that question lies in technology.  Around the end of the 90s, the popularity of emoticons was in fact beginning to decline somewhat.  And then, some intrepid soul invented the 3-D smiley icon.  Oh brother!

3-D animated emoticons soon swept the Web, providing us with an update on the old simple characters we had grown to know and despise.  But the new generation of 3-D emoticons could do much more than just sit there and smile (or frown, or wink, etc.).  No, these new animated cartoon-like characters could sing, dance, walk, run, talk and even perform unusual tasks such as diving, swimming, or smoking cigars.

The cartoon-like nature of the new 3-D Smilies made them an instant hit with younger Internet users.  But it didn't take long before even adults and "old-timers" online (folks over 30!) began to appreciate the animated emoticons too.

Another big benefit of the newest 3-D Smilies is that they are very easy to use.  Many online message boards and instant messaging services have hundreds of animated emoticons available to insert into your messages with a simple click of the mouse.  This makes the new Smilies much easier to use than the old way, where you had to remember the exact characters to type in the exact order to produce the emoticon you wanted.

So there are really several reasons why 3-D emoticons are more popular than ever, and chief among these is the "cuteness factor" and their ease-of-use.  Oh, and lest we forget, emoticons also serve a valuable purpose when typing messages online -- they help us to be understood more clearly.

So whether we love them or despise them, we all might as well get used to having them around.  As technology progresses, we will likely start seeing even more advanced smiley icons in the very near future, and who knows what they will be capable of!