Overuse & misuse of messenger emoticons

This is perhaps a nightmare for many of us, but yet, something that many us also enjoy. Instant messaging was initially plainly text, not even hyperlink support. Remember the days of ICQ some 10 years ago? Sending a hyperlink even required you to use the send URL feature that resulted in the “wabbit” event sound instead of the “uh-oh”.

As instant messaging evolve over the years, more and more features were added, starting with hyperlink support, standard emoticons, winks, and even multimedia support for audio and video conferencing. But perhaps, the most overused and misused feature is the custom emoticons.

With custom emoticons, users can add their own emoticons in their messenger account, in addition to using the standard emoticons provided by the instant messaging software. Each custom emoticon is assigned a keyboard shortcut, and typing the assigned sequence of characters results in the characters being replaced by the custom emoticon.

Now, here comes the problem, when users start adding too many custom emoticons, it caused the text messages sent to the recipeint became unclear. Take for example, a user assigned an emoticon with a smiley face and waving hand in place of hi, with the intention to use such an emoticon to say “hi”. There is absolutely not a problem if the user wants to say “hi”. However, if the user enters any words that contain hi in it such as this, his, shine, dolphin, etc., it caused the hi in those words to be replaced by the emoticon as well, causing the recipient unable to read the message clearly, and troubling the recipient to right click on every icon to view the actual text.

Besides distorting the message, using too many custom emoticons also poses problem to users with slow Internet connections as each and every graphical data for each emoticon must be transmitted from the sender to recipient.

While I am not against the use of such emoticons, there are always rules to play by for using them. For example, a user can use :hi (note the colon character preceding “hi”) instead of just hi. this will prevent any words with the characters hi in it to be replaced by the icons. I used to add a lot of custom emoticons, but with the condition that I add a colon before the original keyboard shortcut.

But, how many users actually bother to do so? The majority of the users add the emoticons the way it is received and causing many other users and myself to unable to read a clear message. As a result, as of last week, i have totally disabled custom emoticons in my Windows Live Messenger. Perhaps this is what you may want to do if you share my views. Sacrifice the fun of custom emoticons for the sake of message clarity.