Emoticons have definitely transformed the way people converse via different forums more commonly in emails, instant messengers, social networking sites, mobile phones and related devices. Emoticons are sometimes referred to as Smileys since the graphics can be used interchangeably. The ‘smiley’ or the ‘smiley face’ is a stylized representation of a smiling human face with the most simple smiley being a yellow circle with two small dots representing eyes.

Emoticons are emotional icons or graphics; they are used to give an illustration of the writer’s current mood, emotions and attitude during conversations, instant or not. They can also be used to enhance written words or as abbreviations which makes them extremely helpful in situations where words are not enough to convey the message. Emoticons portray the expression on the writer’s face or their tone of voice in a lifelike way; they help to unmistakably set the perspective of messages. primarily, emoticons are line of characters that can be found on keyboard shortcuts. The most familiar emoticons are MSN and Yahoo Messenger Emoticons. Beside Yahoo Messenger Emoticons, there is also Yahoo Messenger Hidden Emoticons that are not found in the emoticon menu, and Yahoo Messenger Hidden Emoticons that can be downloaded and added to the accessible emoticon menu.

Free animated emoticons are widely available online. These online sites offer the option to download emoticons specific to Yahoo, MSN and others. Messengerfreak.com offers animated emoticons for MSN Messenger users. These are available in categories such as Animals, Girls Emoticons, Boys Emoticons, Cartoons and Words. Freesmileys.org offers thousands of animated smiley faces mostly available in GIF format. With a choice from over fifty categories smileys may be static or animated and are easy to add to forum posts, social networking sites namely MySpace or Facebook, MSN messenger, Yahoo Messenger, personal websites, blogs, email and more! Other websites for free animated emoticons include msnemoticons.org which has a library of 10,000 emoticons, smilies and other similar products.