25 years ago tomorrow the text based smiley face was born. It’s
unlikely Carnegie Mellon professor Scott E. Fahlman knew the
ideavirus he was unleashing when he posted the simple
combination of colon, dash, open parenthesis, to form :-) giving
birth to the digital horizontal smiley face, but that’s exactly
what he did. Professor Fahlman launched an example of viral
marketing that’s still spreading to this very day. Think about
it. When was the last time you spent any time communicating
online without running into at least one emoticon, whether
graphic or digital? How often have you used one in an email or
instant messaging session? Nearly 31,000,000 results for a
search of ‘emoticons’ at Google and close to 97,000 searches for
the word as reported by Keyword Discovery. Where would we be
without them? You can see how it all got started by reading the
AP story at Physorg.com and if you do notice all the AdSense ads
promoting emoticons and realize that in 25 years three
characters of punctuation have turned into