Facebook emoticons

So when Facebook finally introduced the chat function 6 months ago, they had no idea of the reaction which it would receive. It was literally groundbreaking that a site would get so much attention for adding a slightly different functionality for its users. Overnight, Facebook received hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews, with people from around the world eager to use this new software which was inside the browser.

Facebook emoticons

When it was launched, the reaction was really not amazing. Sure, they had made it available to all users and we could finally see which of our friends was online at any one time, but the whole format was extremely plain and simple – there were no colours, no lights and no emoticons! Nobody (since the early 1990s) had dared to release a chat client without emoticons, and it was crazy to think that Facebook would be any different. Indeed, it didn’t take long for internet users to realize that actually the smileys in Facebook chat were hidden and not available to the first time user.

You had to use secret (or not so secret) keypresses in order to have the smiley faces appear in your chat – so which ones did people start to find first?

The simplest ones were the ‘normal’ emoticons – smiley faces, big smiley faces, a crying emoticon and a shocked face! As soon as these were discovered, however, fans wanted more! People wanted to know if there were any other hidden emoticons or secret smileys in Facebook chat. They didn’t have to wait for long…