Emoticons have definitely transformed the way people communicate via different forums more popularly in emails, instant messengers, social networking sites, mobile phones and like devices. Emoticons are sometimes referred to as Smileys since the graphics can be used interchangeably. The ‘smiley’ or the ‘smiley face’ is a stylized image of a smiling human face with the most simple smiley being a yellow circle with two small dots symbolizing eyes.
Emoticons are emotional icons or graphics; they are employed to give an illustration of the writer’s present mood, emotions and attitude during conversations, instant or not. They can also be used to enhance written words or as abbreviations which makes them really helpful in situations where words are not sufficient to communicate the message. Emoticons portray the expression on the writer’s face or their tone of voice in a lifelike way; they help to unmistakably set the perspective of messages. Mainly, emoticons are line of characters that can be found on keyboard shortcuts. The most common emoticons are MSN and Yahoo Messenger Emoticons. apart from Yahoo Messenger Emoticons, there is also Yahoo Messenger Hidden Emoticons that are not found in the emoticon menu, and Yahoo Messenger Hidden Emoticons that can be downloaded and added to the accessible emoticon menu.
Free animated emoticons are widely available online. These online sites offer the opportunity to download emoticons specific to Yahoo, MSN and others. Messengerfreak.com offers animated emoticons for MSN Messenger users. These are available in categories such as Animals, Girls Emoticons, Boys Emoticons, Cartoons and Words. Freesmileys.org have thousands of animated smiley faces mostly presented in GIF format. With a choice from over fifty categories smileys may be static or animated and are easy to add to forum posts, social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook, MSN messenger, Yahoo Messenger, personal websites, blogs, email and more! Other websites for free animated emoticons include msnemoticons.org which has a library of 10,000 emoticons, smilies and other similar products.