:\ and the list seems endless. I am sure you use them somewhere in your chat, status updates. So Let me define them for you, as per my computer text book.

An emoticon is a textual face of a writer’s mood or facial expression

And what we have made it into

A part of our online language, not limiting just to expressions but a lot more things.

Well, Speaking frankly i never understood the use of these emoticons till i started using twitter. It has been written somewhere that its very difficult to show what you mean by your statement online as you miss some advantages unlike our normal speech conversation where our facial expression, voice tone and speed determines the meaning of the sentence.

If i am speaking with my friend online, one sentence could have various meanings. For example if i say, “Where were you these days?”, if a am speaking then and i want to express the statement inform of a friendly question, I would stress on the word, “were” in the statement, or for anger i would stress on “Where”. But if i am chatting with him yahoo, it’s very difficult for me to convey what i mean (unless i use the Bold, Italics and Underline button every now and then, but after a while it gets a bit annoying).

Emoticons are the best way to express the mood of your statement which helps you out to bring out the meaning of it effectively. 

How “Not” to use emoticons

• Did you just break up with your girlfriend
• Congrats, you’ve won the award as the best employee
• You just failed in your exams

And lots more. Using them incorrectly may land you in great trouble.

How to use Emoticons effectively

• You must always, make it a point to throw statements and comments at the right time, and also analyze some part of the reaction you could receive to such a statement and then accordingly use a Emoticon.
• Don’t use Emoticons very often as they would loose their importance if you do so.
• Your Timing should be perfect. Well, writing half a joke and then putting a “:P” doesn’t go well. Perhaps you might land yourself in trouble if the person to whom you wrote it does not find it funny.
• While interacting with clients emoticons are very useful. Well, winking (“;)”) at your clients every now and then is not a good idea. Limited usage but perfect timing makes it work. On the end of every conversation, adding a “:)” if you think the conversation was pretty good would make your client a bit more
• Using emoticons in Twitter Status updates saves a lot of characters in twitter’s 140 character limit. Using Emoticons at the end of every tweet to tell the mood of the update is pretty good. Usage of more then one emoticon per tweet, (again) reduces the value of the emoticon.

Moving from Emoticons

After emoticons, let me tell you importance of some of the characters, i’ll be concentrating on – “?” and “!”

These apart form just lying somewhere on your keyboard as keys, carry a lot of importance. These can change how your statement appeals to the audience and hence heavily altering what reactions you could get.

Here is one statement i passed on FaceBook and Twitter,

I am sick of my Worksheets

the only difference being the use of  ”!”. Analyze the Results i got. 

On Twitter, without using “!”,

Reaction on twitter

What do you notice? Without the use of a “!” the statement people have nothing much to say about a “Dead” kind of statement but to tell that they had the same experiences. By the way “eu também” means Me Too.

Now check out the Statement made by me on FaceBook, with a “!” and the difference can be spot by the comments about the statement.

Reactions on Facebook

The Comments here are a contrast from those comments on Twitter, made on the same statement without a “!”.  In this case, this would be a pretty, small level to test such things but it’s clearly visible. On twitter, they were sharing their same problem whereas on FaceBook the “!” defines the intensity of the statement and people start commenting advising me to finish off the work.

I don’t have resources to judge these things on Mass Scale but if you see, this can make such differences on small scale then, it’s surely going to make a lot of difference on Large Scale.

Well now you know, why Yahoo! uses a “!” in it’s logo. Perhaps using just Yahoo would make it really dull.