Emoticons turn 25 ) - CIOL News Reports

Emoticons turn 25 :)

Fahlman first used the emoticons in his proposal posted to the Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, 1982

Thursday, September 20, 2007

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Going back to the primitive days, symbols were the popular form of communication.

In this digital era, with sophisticate language in place, people still use symbols to communicate. The combinations of English alphabets and colon, hypens and others are used to denote emotions and sentiments.

Twenty-five years ago, on September 18, Scott E Fahlman first used the smiley :- ) in his proposal posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board.

Fahlman had wrote " I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-( ." Today is the 25th anniversary of smiley :- ), which uses colon, hypen and parenthesis.

According to reports, to celebrate this anniversary, the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department has launched an annual "Smiley Award," recognizing innovations in technology-assisted communication. The competition is open to School of Computer Science students and teams. The winner will get $500 from sponsor Yahoo! Inc.

The winner will be featured on Yahoo! Messengers service worldwide.

Pranesh Anthapur, COO, Yahoo! India, said, "We ran Emoticon contest across US, India and Vietnam where we asked users to contribute what they need as emoticons."

"Users submitted pictures and captions for their emoticons. This contest ran for five weeks in July where in the first two weeks users contributed and voted for their Favorites user-generated entries. The third week was open only for voting. During the fourth and fifth week, we featured the top 10 voted emoticons from India. We got more than 600 entries from the users in India. Some of these selected emoticons will feature in our future Messenger release," Anthapur added.

We now use different combination of hypen, parenthesis, semi-colon, colon to communicate out emotions and sentiments.

Emoticons is being imbibed in our everyday communication be it via sending message as SMS, or instant messenger or emails, they are dominating our way of communication.

In the web forum and instant messenger, these colon and hypen are replaced with smiley graphic images. Even the Microsoft word automatically converts these symbols into smiley.

Yahoo! Messenger was the first major instant messaging service to offer animated emoticons in 2002 and take the smiley face to the next level in web communication.

As part of the emoticon celebration, Yahoo! conducted a survey of 40,000 Yahoo! Messenger users, to reveal where and how emoticons play a role in everyday communication: Around 82 per cent of those who use Yahoo! Messenger daily use emoticons in their IM conversations.

Many being comfortable with using these emoticons to express any kind of feelings, does not defer the concept of images and pictures as the best form of communication which was used way long back. Just that the English Alphabets and symbols have twisted and tweaked in forming an emoticon.

©CyberMedia News

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