TheSmileyWorld.com was created to help people find cool smileys. We have thousands of smileys and also promote other smiley softwares. We have conducted reviews of various smiley sites and will continue adding to our review site. If you own smiley software, please email us through our contact form and we will review your smiley toolbar or website.

Smileys have been around for a VERY long time and just like any technology, they have majorly evolved. It all started with the ASCII characters of :) and evolved to static smileys, animated smileys, talking smileys and sending smileys to mobile phones!

Here are some snippets from WIKIPEDIA that explain the history of smileys.

"The graphic was popularized in the early 1970s by Bernard and Murray Spain, who seized upon it in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day" (devised by Gyula Bogar). It can show many different emotions."

The smiley has become an essential part of Internet culture, with animated GIF and other image representations, as well as the ubiquitous text-based emoticon, " :-) ". The smiley has been used for the printable version of characters 1 and 2 (one "black", the other "white") on the default font on the IBM PC and successor compatible machines. In modern times, all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95[13] were able to display the smiley since it is part of the Windows Glyph List (though not all fonts include the character and not all programs were Unicode-compliant).

The two original text smileys, :-) to indicate a joke and :-( to mark things that are not a joke were invented on September 19, 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science. His original post at the CMU CS general board, where he suggested the use of the smileys, was retrieved on September 10, 2002 by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x) as proof to support the claim.