Free smileys and emoticons are the perfect way to bring some extra personality and emotion to instant messages, emails and forum posts.
Instant message smileys (also known as emoticons) are also used in text messaging via phone.
Many chat clients such as Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger have also built into their applications graphics that will appear when the user types in emoticons.
When trying to create a taxonomy of emoticons, the easiest method is to go with the categories of emotions that the instant message smileys are designed to convey.
The best emoticons are the ones that intuitively trigger the image going along with the emotion - the smile, the frown, the pursed lips, the widened eyes.
