MyEmoticons

Emoticons are a very efficient and enormously popular way to concisely express your emotions and whole ideas on the Web.

Using a combination of characters and punctuation marks or an animated picture can be much more lucid than verbose explanations. The bad news is that the standard emoticon collections you get on, say, Facebook are far from being perfect or even large. MyEmoticons can provide you with a solution to this dramatic problem. It works essentially as a browser extension: after you install the program on your computer, you should first activate it in your browser to use it. The list of compatible browsers includes: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

Once activated, MyEmoticons adds new emoticon collections to Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. The developer claims that the Hotmail and Yahoo support is coming up soon. The smiley libraries offer several hundreds of emoticons and are constantly updated with new ones. They are divided into three large categories and numerous subcategories. The former include 'Smileys & Emoticons' proper, 'Objects', i.e. somewhat more complicated emoticons, and 'Text', which are text-related emoticons. The subcategories reflect either emotions ('Love', 'Sad') or refer to some specific topic areas like 'Movie' or 'Halloween'.

In my tests, MyEmoticons worked just fine. I managed to install it without much ado, although it took quite a while until I twigged how it is done. The emoticon libraries were added to all supported services in all three supported browsers. Even though the esthetic value of their visual style is questionable, I think it is a rather subjective drawback. However, the program has a huge objective one as well: the smileys are not displayed to your counterpart as long as they haven't installed MyEmoticons. Instead, they get to see an offer to download their own copy of the smiley library, which, of course, drastically decreases the usefulness of MyEmoticons.

All in all, MyEmoticons seems to be a nice free emoticon library, probably the best one. However, if you are absolutely sure none of your social contacts uses it (or at least most don't), I'd advise against installing it.