While most instant messaging services offer Emoticons and smiley icons in abundance, Twitter has so far refrained from following suit. This even remains true with the ever increasing popularity and use of Emoticons in other areas of the Internet which help show emotion during user conversations.
Many people, while loving the Twitter concept, desire the inclusion of emoticons and smileys on their Interface, but at the time of writing, Twitter have no intentions of adding them to their service. The reason for this is that they are seen as a method of degrading the quality and look of the overall experience and worries about Emoticon spamming come to fruition. Twitter’s defence is that their service is for micro-blogging text and with the limited 140 character limit; there is no room for emoticons on their message boards.
Many Twitter users feel that the service is lacking because of this decision and see Twitter as even being incomplete without them.
There is however, an alternative. ‘TwitterKeys’* is a website which has a list of UTF compatible characters that can be used on Twitter posts. These are not as detailed as typical emoticons and smileys from say Facebook or Yahoo! Messenger; however they do show basic graphic images in black and white – more than is currently supported by Twitter by default.
The Emoticons are fairly basic but there is a good range of content varying from a telephone image to a moon, hearts, stars, flowers and other typical symbols that you would expect to find on an Emoticon list.
Implementing them into Twitter is very simple too. Simply double click on the Emoticon or icon that is to be used, hold down ‘Ctrl + C’ to copy the image and then press ‘Ctrl + V’ to paste the image into the Twitter text box. It’s as easy as that. These TwitterKey Emoticons are not just limited to the Twitter website either, they can be used in documents such as Word and Excel or on other instant messaging tools and social media websites.
The link to find TwitterKeys is below.
