MSN symbols
MSN is by far the world’s most popular chat network – it has been around for many, many years and has been a constant fixture in the Windows operating system for more than a decade. People choose to chat on MSN for many reasons, the biggest of them being that the majority of their friends, families and co-workers also use it. It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy that unless you have an MSN account, you can’t chat with your friends – and then the cycle repeats itself.
Anyway, MSN is probably not the most technologically advanced chat network, it was indeed later than many in introducing webcam support for chatting (something which Yahoo Messenger still does much better), however it did do one thing right – it allowed uploading of custom emoticons to its service. This meant that users could use their own graphics and images to make funny symbols and emotes to send to their friends.
This has been going on for many years now, but recent developments in the software world and the interconnected internet has meant that these smileys are no becoming obsolete. Why? Because people don’t just use the Windows Live Messenger software to communicate any more – they use their mobile phones, netbooks and browsers to connect to the internet, which means that they are not able to communicate with their ’saved settings’ on their computers and see their custom emoticons.
This has led to a huge number of users going ‘back to basics’ with their MSN chats when they talk on services like Meebo. They don’t need to use fancy graphics or smilies when they see their friends – they just use words! Novel right? Well, of course, this would never last.
People demanded more flexibility from their new chat networks, which means that a new alternative has been sought – and what an alternative. Many people expected that new technology would take over and provide a solution to this issue, but actually the answer lies in a function of Windows that has existed for years – the character map!
MSN symbols are special characters that you can copy and paste from different fonts, and use in you status, username or on any website which uses text! These include Facebook, Myspace, your website – anywhere! Because these symbols for MSN are actually just characters that you can see on the screen, you don’t need to download any software or upload anything to your software!
As time passes by, and information is passed and kept in a simpler state so as to maximise compatibility, we will see MSN symbols become a larger part of our vocabulary!
Danny T is a blogger and social network enthusiast who loves to use MSN symbols wherever he goes!
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