Shades of LiveJournal and MySpace. Facebook, 1999 called, and they want their mood emoticons back. People are starting to find the new Facebook emoticon options in their status update area. And they are pretty much identical to MySpace and LiveJournal moods, although we suspect that maybe the inspiration was the iPhone Emoji (emojicons).
(Yes, Prince, apparently we really are going to party like it’s 1999.)
The Facebook mood icons include cute little faces; little food items like bowls of soup, ice cream cones, and sushi; beverage images like cups of coffee and martini glasses, and more. Any cute little image you could want to insert as emoticons into your Facebook status update. Here’s how the Facebook status icons work, and how to know if you have the Facebook emoticons for your status updates on your timeline.
We also explain what’s in it for Facebook, and why you should think twice before using them, although we know that too few people will, and that most will just start blindly using them, without that second thought.
Facebook Emoticons
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MySpace and LiveJournal Mood Icons
If the gods of Facebook emoticons have favoured you, you will have a little smiley face at the bottom of your status update window, next to the tagging, location, and image options:
When you click on the happy face, it will give you a drop-down list of the various categories of emoticons of which you can avail yourself (and with which you can torture your Facebook friends). These include Feelings, what you are Watching, what you are Reading, what you are Listening to, and what you are Drinking or Eating:
Clicking on a category brings up several choices under that category. For example, clicking on “Drinking” brings up these options:
In any event, you select your status emoticon or icon, and it appears in your status update box along with the corresponding descriptor, for you to publish, and here is where it gets interesting.
Let’s say you want to tell the world that you are eating soup (although why you would want to do that is beyond us). Here’s how that looks:
Did you notice how “soup” is linkified?
That’s because it is linked to the Facebook soup page (yes, there really is a page for nearly everything).
In this case there are over 40,000 people who have liked this page for…soup!
Now, think about this. Why would Facebook create such a system? Just so that their users can play around with cute little mood and food icons? No, because if that were their sole reason, why link to pages?
While maybe nobody stands to profit from a “Soup” page, how about the page for the show you are watching, or the book you are reading? There are real companies behind those pages, companies that want eyeballs, and that pay Facebook handsomely to get those eyeballs on their page. And we’re betting that having the Starbucks page added to the drinking options, or the Chilis page added to the eating options, are in the pipe as soon as Facebook ties it to gether.
Now, instead of just telling your friends what you are up to, you are driving traffic away from your timeline, and onto a sponsor’s page.
Once more, on Facebook, every move you make, they’ll be monetizing you.
You can, by the way, create your own status, and choose an icon for it. But it’s harder than you might think to pick a noun or verb that doesn’t already have a Facebook page. Or, at least that has a page associated with its type, which means that you can’t create a brand new status icon for it (we know, we tried):
(Don’t know what cat poop coffee is? Read about cat poop coffee here.)
Here’s how it works if you happen to stumble upon one of the few things for which there is no Facebook page or associated page:
We were pretty sure that there was no page for 111222333444915y8x, and we were right:
When you create your own status mood, activity or item, you are offered several mood or activity icons from which to choose:
And this is how it looks:
So, what do you think of the new Facebook emoticons?
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