How to Find Awesome Smileys

Urban Dictionary defines Awesome Smiley as the coolest thing ever created on the face of the earth.

Now while that may be a little over the top dramatic truth is there are a lot of awesome smileys available to brighten up your communications.There is a whole world of smileys out there beyond the simple ? and ? the secret is finding them.

There are two different kinds of smileys to find ones that are created by simple code and interpreted differently depending on what application you use them in. The second kind is delivered to you through a 3rd party application such as a toolbar to allow you to choose from a whole range of smileys on the fly.

You will also find that certain applications have their own sets of smileys such as instant messaging programs or user forums. Most work off a core set of similar smileys however. You can also find some program with Easter egg smileys that are not available through the user interface. A good example of this is Skype’s hidden smileys.

If you would have told people 30 years ago we would all start using simple smiling icons in our messages to show sentiment it would have certainly seemed weird. Today so much of our communication is written through the web that sometimes showing emotion is difficult without using some indicator of how we mean what we said.

With the lack of people hearing words spoken out loud and instead reading them in text our language loses a lot of inflection and intent having a large range of awesome smileys at your fingertips solves that problem.

Smileys have become common place in online communications such as e-mail, instant messaging and even texting. The more smileys you have to choose from the larger range of emotion you can express which makes it so your message has a much higher chance of being understood the way you intended it to.

Although emoticons and what we now call smileys were invented online in 1982 when Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University added them in a message he sent. The reality is that these types of emotion pictures have been used in writings dating back to the 19th century.

So the next time you want to express yourself don’t settle for a simple ? or ? find an awesome smiley that really says what you feel and share it with the world.