That originated in a conversation posted to a CMU message thread dated September 16, 1982. Fahlman suggested the sequence as a way to designate a post as one with humorous intent, presumably for the humor-impaired.

Fahlman’s Yahoo interview noted how the concept quickly spread to other message board users. People began to create new smileys, like ones indicating surprise, or even renditions of people like the Pope or Abraham Lincoln.

“It was gratifying that my colleagues found the idea so amusing, but I figured that it would stop there and would gradually fade away as the novelty wore off,” Fahlman said.

It didn’t, instead becoming a feature on messaging clients like Yahoo’s, AOL’s, and others after the Internet began reaching a broader commercial audience in the 1990s.

Fahlman isn’t really a fan of the heavily-animated smileys seen on rich messaging clients today. He would like to have one that truly captures emotion, like Munch’s “The Scream,” he said in the interview.

“When deadlines are looming and things are going wrong, I

Whether they feel or or even >:-( there is probably a combination of characters to express it in text. Instant messaging clients like AIM and Yahoo! Messenger translate those smileys into little bits of artwork, some of which are even animated.

Ask.com has made it a little easier to find the meaning behind the smileys with an update to their Smart Answer feature. The team behind the service described the fun feature in a recent blog post:

Smileys have been with computer users for at least 24 years. The first recorded smiley on a computer network showed up in 1982, at Carnegie Mellon University.

The introduction of a joke into an otherwise serious online discussion sailed over the virtual heads of participants. After several suggestions for joke markers were bounced around, Scott Fahlman suggested the smiley and the frown. The three-character smiley has endured for almost a generation.

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Smilehouse is known for its “Workspace Enterprise,” a packaged software building and running business-to-consumer and business-to-business Webshops. The platform supports Web operations whose customers are in different target areas and which are offered different order and delivery processes.

“Our development efforts are focused on adding new relevant e-commerce features. Because of that, the strategic partnership with the top-class Payment Service Provider ChronoPay helps us to enhance our solutions as being offered to our clients,” said Tapio Talvisalo, who is in charge of marketing and strategic partnerships at Smilehouse.

ChronoPay will also add Smilehouse’s “Workspace Standard” and “Workspace Small Business Edition” for smaller merchants, both of which can later be expanded to Workspace Enterprise as Webshops mature. Small Business Edition is designed to replace homemade solutions and PHP scripts some online businesses may be using.

“With its line of Workspace applications Smilehouse offers complete e-commerce solutions for not only e-business start-ups and the SME sector, but also for larger corporations who would like to expand their current offline activities onto the Internet”, said Ido Schiferli, marketing manager EU at ChronoPay.

“When combined with our secure, multi-currency processing solutions Smilehouse’s e-commerce software is perfectly suited for any of our European merchants.”

That’s right. Want to show someone on AIM that you’re grinning? You may have to write out “I’m smiling” instead of making a simple . And you’d better scour your childrens’ sticker books, lest little Timmy incur the wrath of the retail giant by placing the wrong decal on his toybox.

No, this isn’t a joke. Wal-Mart is locked in a patent battle over the rights to Mr. Smiley. The corporation says that they would have allowed it to remain in the public domain, except that a London-based company known as SmileyWorld threatened to register the image. That’s according to Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley, whose last name is suspiciously close to the cartoon in question.

I promise, this is real. A decision is expected from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in August. Not that I really want any particular entity to own rights to the smiley, but given the choices here, I’m kind of rooting for SmileyWorld. They own the rights to the logo in more than 80 countries already, and there hasn’t been so much as a peep of trouble about them. Wal-Mart, on the other hand . . . .

So choose your sides and place your bets, folks. On the subject of world domination: Wal-Mart, Google, or Starbucks? If Wal-Mart wins, we might at least get a bunch of cheerful yellow smileys to look at.

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What do Microsoft and Yahoo have planned? Will they spoil Google’s Media Day next week with a groundbreaking deal announcement? Tell us what you think at WebProWorld.

While it doesn’t quite match Smiley and Karla meeting on the bridge in Smiley’s People for intensity, the idea that Microsoft and Yahoo have conducted clandestine coffee-klatchs and mused over the downfall of Google just sounds so, well, 1970s.

Instead of the delicate and exacting tradecraft of spymasters being employed by the second and third place companies in terms of search engine market share, the Wall Street Journal reported that the duo, Microsoft and Yahoo, have been quietly conversing, while sources “familiar with the situation” informing on their corporate masters.

Perhaps we can cast Redmond in the role of Soviet-era Russia, and Yahoo as the Iron Curtain-wearing East Germany. Both seek to undermine the American influence of Google during the Cold War. The bullets in this battle won’t be fired from automatic weapons, though.

No, contextual ads have proven more damaging in the Cold War of paid search than any fusillade of automatic weapons fire. Google, the West, has grown and prospered, while the East has stagnated behind the West, envied its wealth, drifted behind in the search technology arena.

Separate, they haven’t been able to make inroads. Not that they have not been trying. Yahoo has its improved search advertising relevance algorithms in testing with “Project Panama.” Sometime soon, Yahoo may bring Panama in from the cold of Scandinavia, and test it in the United Kingdom this summer.

Microsoft has been belligerent and vocal in developing its search ad rival called adCenter. On occasion, it has been aggressive in touting its paid search technology. Those with long enough memories may recall video of Khruschev at the United Nations in 1960, pounding a shoe on a table in defiance of the assembly and sending Americans to bed wondering if the next sunrise would be the start of a nuclear winter.

The younger audience only needs to recall the tale of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, allegedly throwing a chair upon learning of a subordinate’s defection, to imagine similar anger. If that ever happened, of course.

Today, Yahoo delivers contextual advertising to its potentially closer ally, Microsoft. But that relationship ends when June does, and adCenter steps in to replace Overture throughout Microsoft’s online properties.

That closeness received some emphasis as a purportedly leaked internal email from Ballmer to the Redmondians found its way to the Seattle Times. A fist-pumping Ballmer, likely echoing a pose from his collegiate athletic days, appears with the article.

Ballmer told Microsoft’s employees that the company would make “heavy investments” in Internet search. “[O]ur goal is to create the Web’s largest advertising network, giving us an engine that will enable us to monetize our services and compete against Google,” Ballmer wrote.

They won one skirmish recently, possibly the equivalent of Alex Leamas being cornered and gunned down in an alley at the end of “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.” Amazon ditched Google web search in favor of Microsoft for the Alexa and A9 websites.

That probably wasn’t a significant wound to Google, but it drew blood nonetheless. Microsoft and Yahoo want to bleed Google more. Reportedly, they have been discussing how to do so.

Microsoft took one step that reinforces the Ballmer Memo, by luring Steve Berkowitz from Ask.com to take control of MSN.

There’s money to spend in Redmond’s war coffers, in the billions. They could spend it on Yahoo. It doesn’t make sense to do that though. Unless Microsoft wanted to buy Overture and/or Project Panama to complement MSN adCenter, and combine their ad networks.

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You can post your free listing on Expo and then have it displayed automatically, with a photo and an excerpt, to visitors to your blog.

The Spaces team has been busy lately. Their biggest addition was the RSS feed module last month. It allows you to create a sidebar module containing content from any RSS feed, letting you include Flickr photos, sports scores, your other blogs, del.icio.us links, Netflix rentals, and your Amazon wishlist.

Meanwhile, Expo is running an interesting contest. If you attend one of four colleges (University of Wisconsin – Madison, University of Washington, Ohio State University, University of Texas) then “International Collector Edward G. Ramos III” is looking to buy items from you. Ramos III is looking for “obscure” yet valueless items, for which he’ll pay top dollar (in other words, if you list something stupid, you might win a prize).

He’s looking for:

• 40 piggy banks at $20 apiece
• 20 Smiley Faced maracas at $30 apiece
• 20 hardhats for $30 apiece
• 10 stuffed huskies or stuffed Bucky Badgers at $100 apiece
• 10 “Death to Smoochy” DVDs for $100 apiece
• 2 Atari Donkey Kong game cartridges for $500 each
• 2 Ice Cube or Death Cab For Cutie concert tickets for $500 each
• A Homer Simpson Chia Pet for $1000
• An Easy-Bake Oven for $1000

What a cool idea! My only regret is that it is limited to college students, and specific college students, which means I can’t get the Donkey Kong bounty (I’ve held onto that game long enough, and $500 is plenty!). Edward G. Ramos III has his own MSN Space, even.

Expo seems to be taking off. There are over 3000 listings in the New York area, and they aren’t promoting and aren’t really accepting many New York people, so that’s significant. I hope more people try it out, since Windows Live has taken a unique and smart approach to the online community marketplace.

If you haven’t given it a shot, check it out.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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Wouldn’t it have been funny if the explorers found that the meteorite had landed on a copy of ’52nd Street’? If it did, someone could have posted the story on a BBS, and if they’d seen this post, the user may have been inspired to add a to the story.

Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, serious people used serious computer systems to perform research and to communicate, after a fashion. Being serious types, the introduction of humor into a discussion merited, well, further discussion.

It all started when people at Carnegie Mellon University experienced confusion when posts about mercury in an elevator didn’t clearly note the post was a joke. One person, Neil Swartz, suggested marking jokes with a (*) in the subject line. Scott Fahlman, who very evidently possessed a sense of humor, responded:

17-Sep-82 13:04 Scott Fahlman at CMU-10A Elevators (*) Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the elevator…

Unfortunately, the center elevator now contains what seems to be the remains of 40,000 two-pound pigeons in an advanced state of decomposition and the right elevator contains a bear of indeterminate color. The left elevator appears to be safe, but when you stand in it for too long, your voice gets squeaky and you start running into the walls, causing the elevator to rise. Despite the * in the header of this message, this is not a joke and should be taken quite literally. Do not panic — taking the stairs is good for you.

Other suggestions were made by the learned contributors from CMU: *%, &, # (with a lengthy justification for it). And then Fahlman invented the smiley:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

The frowning smiley would have been appropriate for some other computer related research performed in 1982. At Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center (which invented the GUI, not Apple, by the way), two researchers developed the first computer worm; it was an experiment in parallel processing, not the malicious threats we know 23 years later.

The Cosmos-1 mission lifts off at approximately 3:45 pm EDT today. The Planetary.org web site has slowed to a crawl this morning, and has been inaccessible. But the Cosmos-1 site SolarSail.org is still available and counting down to this afternoon’s launch.

A converted ICBM, a Russian Volna rocket leftover from the days of George Smiley and James Bond, will carry the solar sail 500 miles above the Earth. After several days, inflatable tubes will open the eight solar sails, and the craft will attempt to capture photons emitted by the sun and move in space.

The mission will serve as a proof of concept for using solar sails. Should it prove successful, solar sails may be a feasible alternative for future interplanetary missions. In theory, a solar sail craft can attain great speeds, but must have a star or an artificial source of photons to keep it moving.

Perhaps, a future Mars mission will see the solar sail used to help move cargo from Earth to the Red Planet, while NASA’s projected Crew Exploration Vehicle carries a human crew there.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.