Many of the newer instant messenger clients
have a suite of free emotion icons that are
automatically inserted whenever the user types
a certain text string, and there are also web
sites that offer free emotion icons that can be
used to expand the limited set of free emotion
icons that are included by default with the
messengers.
Sites that offer free emotion icons take advantage of the
instant messenger software's ability to include web images as
part of the message. The free emotion icons are stored on
a web server and when the instant messenger user wishes to
include one of the free emotion icons, he or she simply inserts
the message URL into the text of the message using the
appropriate tags.
One of the best sources of free emotion icons is the free
emoticons website found at smileys.ws.
This site has hundreds of free emotion icons that are grouped
into various categories such as laughing icons, surprised
icons, angry icons, sports icons, and just about any other
category of free emotion icons imaginable.
If you use MSN Messenger and are concerned about relying on
a third party web server to hold your free emotion icons, the
web site emoinstaller.com
offers a wide range of free emotion icons for MSN
Messenger that can installed locally and do not require a
callback to a web server.
Regardless of what emotion or idea you are trying to
express, there are likely free emotion icons that you can use
that will do the job for you. Some of the sites that
offer free emotion icons require you to include the URL of the
image location, while others provide free emotion icons that
can be installed directly to your computer.