Facebook is now an indisputable part of all of our lives, and Facebook chat emoticons (those microscopic icons and smileys that you can see within chats and conversations in Facebook chat) are becoming more and more recognizable every day. It is roughly fair to say that soon these emotions will be more recognizable than their counterparts on MySpace.
But where did these emotes come from? What caused Facebook to introduce these pictures into their chatting principles and why did they choose not to give guidance as to how to well insert them into the conversations themselves? For the answers to these questions, we should look at the history of social networking in general, and how Facebook rose from a University campus experiment to the king of the web.
Facebook.com
Five years ago, MySpace dominated the social networking scene. It had managed to destroy assorted up and coming networks (such as Friendster and Hi5) ordinarily by brute force and power of numbers - it had more subscribers than anything else and it knew it. It had so many habitancy that it alerted the venture capitalist manufactures who all wanted to invest in what was soon to be the one true killer website for the world. So what went wrong?
MySpace became favorite originally straight through giving habitancy a core goods which was missing at the time - conversation and communication between friends. We could all use email and sometimes chat on Msn, but MySpace was a assistance which brought together photos, chatting (even though it was not live) and networking (meeting new people), and they did it well. There was a problem, however. Due to the huge numbers of subscribers, some habitancy began to feel that they were anonymous. 'MySpace friends' figures spiralled out of control, and habitancy would compete to have the most. Pages suddenly became clogged with messages from habitancy who were not your contacts, promoting themselves or their products. The admins bowed to pressure and also allowed convention Css files in to the site, meaning glitter and absorbing graphics began to make each page look like a 16 year old girl's wardrobe. habitancy wanted an alternative.
Enter Facebook. Started on the campus of Harvard University as a way to help friends keep in touch with each other and to develop their social calendars, it fast spread due to its clear, clean develop and its simplicty. A simplicity that MySpace now lacked. Word of the tool spread, and it started being replicated on other campuses, and then into distinct nations. At last it became open to all members of the public, and was translated (by its users) into distinct languages. It was as close to open source as an great international social network could get.
Facebook succeeded in wooing users away from MySpace because they were contribution that same core goods - the potential to communicate. They also managed to stay ahead of the curve by not swaying from their customary goal of being easy to use and to bring habitancy together. When they introduced their chat program, habitancy idea that they might have lost sight of this goal, they were wrong though.
Facebook chat was introduced two years ago, and tested extensively in a handful of users. habitancy were intrigued by the basic seeing client, and wondered if this 'addon' might well end up being a mistake. It wasn't, however, as soon habitancy realised that the bells and whistles which other chat programs like Msn and Yahoo added were just distractions, and what they needed to use Fb chat for was just that - chatting and communicating.
Facebook knew that there would be a ask for some sort of icons, smileys or emoticons though - and they took action. They installed several 'hidden smilies', each one accessible straight through typing a unavoidable code into your chat screen. Sometimes habitancy found them by accident, other times they went to look for lists online which could give them a clue as to how to insert them. Whether way, Facebook chat emoticons became a part of the modern social network vocabulary, and now we can't escape them - and why would we want to?
Facebook Chat Emoticons
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