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Comment by nancyminusone | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?

Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.

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The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that.

(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)

Yahoo Messenger had amazing fun animated smileys, and it was a fantastic Instant Messenger as well. Too bad Yahoo went to dogs, I was hoping Yahoo Messenger got bought out by Microsoft so that beautiful UI could be integrated as MS Office chat. Instead, Micro$oft acquired Skype, mainly for its VOIP ability, and it took years to integrate it into MS Office as MS Teams, which is a boring tool (but it is effective for video conferencing and basic chat purposes).

I miss those animated smileys.

Even WhatsApp and other popular social messaging platforms (Instagram, Signal, etc.) don't have them. Instead, we got GIFs (whose online gallery takes ages to load in WhatsApp, in recent months, at least on my phone) and animated stickers. sigh

Even Gadu-Gadu had them.

A really cool feature of Windows Live Messenger (perhaps also MSN Messenger before it?) was you that smileys were viral. You could add your own, and people could right-click on the ones you used to copy them to their own collection.

It was great! And in MSN Messenger you could assign any string to be replaced by the smiley (which were basically any image including animated gifs) so some people’s writing was totally unreadable as letter or phrases were replaced with these images. Fun times

https://emojistime.com/museum

If you want a trip down memory lane.

Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)).

ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.

You have it backwards, sir, :-) are the emoticons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font.

:-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.

You're probably right about the terminology being around for a while, but I think most people just called them smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah, that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed that nobody used that term colloquially.

I completely forgot about "J" and the discourse it causes amongst my friend group.

Microsoft Office used Wingdings, but forums (based on e.g. phpBB) or IMs would replace :) with an image.

> short-lived

Outlook was doing this even 3-4 years ago.

3-4 years ago I hope it was actual emojis, and not Wingdings.

It was Wingdings.

But they do use Unicode emojis now.

Don't forget cursor customizers!

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