MSN Symbols

                                             

For years now, people have been using emoticons and smileys in their MSN chats. There is good reason for this phenomenon - as the internet has evolved over time, more and more features and options have become available to its users, and the cornerstone of online communication is chat.

Starting on the 14.4baud modems of the Commodore 64, moving from bulletin boards to IRC, chat has blossomed into a multi-million dollar industry, filled with entrepreneurs who are constantly attempting to work upon the basic concept of passing text messages to each other and make it glossier, sexier and add their own special twist. Some have been more successful than others.

Probably the biggest and most significant change in the history of chat was the introduction of the graphical emoticon or smiley face symbol. First seen on ICQ in the early nineties, and then mastered by Microsoft with their MSN program later, the smiley face personified everything that the internet generation was feeling at the time. It was cool, it was digital and it could avoid wasting long periods of time typing.

Microsoft didn't rest on its laurels, and continued to develop the idea of using graphical images to represent what it saw as people's feelings. In a later version of MSN Messenger, they came up with the genius idea of allowing people to add their own emoticons to their client, effectively opening up a new industry of custom logos and emotes which would drive their product forward for the next five years.

As the demand for smileys and emotions grew, so did the userbase of MSN. Especially in the United States of America, the number of users began to outstrip the already well established AOL Instant Messenger. The flexibility of MSN was becoming its major feature, but it would also hamper it in the months to come.

In the last few years, the world of online instant messaging has again exploded, as companies realised that they must allow their users to communicate with other software users easily and seamlessly, or they will be left behind by the fickle public. This has led to a number of new issues which faced the companies who operate chat software (such as Microsoft) - inter-compatibility.

By opening up their API, Microsoft had given companies such as Meebo (an online aggregator of chat services which allows you to stay in touch with all of your friends at the same time) the opportunity to use its data and connect with its severs - however, there was one feature which it was impossible for other companies to harness - the personal emotions that people had saved in their clients.

Users had a new demand - they wanted to be able to use special characters and symbols to represent their emotions, and they wanted to use them across a wide variety of platforms and software. It was at this time that the public realised that what they in fact wanted had been there all along, in the form of MSN symbols.

These special characters were already installed in the character maps of windows users, and had been ever since they first installed Windows. Special images which could be copied and pasted just like normal letters into word documents, Facebook statuses, onto MySpace pages and most importantly, they could be used in MSN chat, usernames and statuses. The MSN heart symbol, music notes and stars found that their simplicity had once again made them in hot demand - and people began using symbols for MSN more and more due to the fact that they could be used anywhere and were not tied to one product, like custom emoticons.

What will the next step be in the history of the emote? We will wait and see, but for now the uncrowned king of the graphical emotional representation is surely - the MSN symbol!

Sammy is a technology author who writes about social networking and loves MSN symbols. His favourite is the special character for a snowman.