Facebook emoticons

After the first batch of Facebook emoticons was introduced, as previously mentioned, the search traffic and pageviews on the main site went bananas. People who had become bored of the ‘faux real time’ commenting on people’s walls and generally not being able to have real contact with eachother had begun to leave the site. MSN saw a slight increase its usage (I mean Windows Live Messenger, not the terrible ‘spaces’ project which is completely doomed) as people went back to live chat.

Facebook chat emoticons

The introduction of the chat function, and also the Facebook smileys within it, changed all that. People were excited about logging on again, and it showed. The first ‘wave’ of emotes had become symbols of a new affection that people had for the site – and some of them had never been seen before.

New emoticons

Whenever anyone launches a product, they have to deal with the possibility that they may be infringing on someone else’s copyright, or at the very least they may seem to be copying their style. When Facebook’s management team brought in the basic icons for chat (such as the yellow smiley faces), people were concerned that they would be just the same as their competition – MSN, AIM and Yahoo chat. So what did Facebook do? What they’ve always done before. They adapted!

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This is part one of ‘a brief history of Facebook emoticons’. If you liked it, please read part two which will be published soon! Thanks and enjoy this new batch of Facebook emoticons article!