Evolution of Smileys

If you have no idea what a smiley is then you have most likely never turned on a computer or watched over your kids shoulder when they are online, because they are everywhere. However, don’t let the kids try to fool you into thinking that this is something that their generation developed. Next time they decide to tell you exactly how lame the adult world is by all means tell them that the original smiley was born on September 19, 1982.

And if being "old" wasn't enough the inventor, Scott Fahlman, was a professor at a university making him both old and educated, something that some of the younger generation tend to look at with contempt. Granted the original smileys were simple and basic, this :-) was used to convey that a certain post on the schools website board was meant to be a joke and this :-( meant that the message should be taken seriously.

It seemed that in a matter of months these characters and symbols took on a life of their own. A few of those early ones included a person wearing glasses B-), Santa Claus *<|:-), and even Abraham Lincoln =):-)=. The creator had no idea that this would catch like wild fire and did not keep the original post that he sent out to others at the university with his ideas on these characters. However, in 2001 Microsoft along with University staff started digging through the old back up tapes that had been used and the original post was located, giving the credit to Scott Fahlman.

There have been tremendous strides made since those early days such as the computer book publisher O’Reilly & Associates put out a 93 page print "emoticon" dictionary entitled Smiley's. An astronomy student began compiling an online emoticon dictionary that now has over 2,200 entries. Within the last five years the US Patent & Trademark Office has received 24 emoticon related applications, some of which are still pending.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of smileys is that it has evolved into many different forms that express diverse emotions. And, much like Darwin’s evolution theory these small expressive smiley faces have managed to evolve and they have mastered different complex actions in their virtual forms. While they were originally used more in email they have become very popular in the Instant Messaging world. This is partially because of their ability to mimic particular human actions such as yawning, snoring, sleeping, etc. and vividly expressing the feelings of the sender.

The newer smileys can interact with other smileys. They can hang around together, dance, hug, play, work and they can even fall in love and get married while performing ceremonies and rites such as weddings. These types of smileys are the most recently available that you can add to your desktop, they are cute and even amusing.

So, if you are feeling slightly bored with your cluttered, dust attracting desktop try adding some of those virtual buddies to it; as they have been known to raise ones spirits through their expressive and almost human emotions.