Where did those pesky little emoticons come from? I mean, originally? It turns out we all have Scott Fahlman to thank! The original forum posting, grabbed from Wikipedia, was:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman : - )
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

: - )

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

: - (

As you all know, we’ve been hard at work for our upcoming release. The good news is that we’re getting down to that testing period when there’s time for a little side project here and there. A new emoticon probably won’t make the next release, but we’ll probably be able to follow up shortly with a couple more trick emoticons…David’s just itching to give’em a go.

So in that spirit, leave a comment and suggest the keystroke (eg: >:)) and meaning of the emoticon you’d like to see added to meebo next!

Seth

[ comments ] [ past blogs ]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 1:30 am and is filed under meeblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.