Happy 25th Anniversary! :-)

Enough is enough: We're smart enough to know when you're happy, sad

(NEWSER) - Since its inception in 1982, the "smiley" has been used in a number of ways, all of which make Mary Elizabeth Williams "want to smack the half circle off its stupid face." Even though bright people use emoticons, "when I see a smiley, my first thought is, 'What are you, 12 years old?'" she writes in Salon . It's time for the ubiquitous :-)—along with its garish, animated, higher-tech counterpart—to die. More»

Teaching millennials causes new frustrations for college writing professors

(NEWSER) - College professors have lamented the state of student writing for centuries. But today’s Internet-obsessed culture brings new, infuriating errors to Writing 101 as students brazenly use colloquialisms like “:-)” and “LOL” in essays. “Occasionally, I've seen someone using the number 4 for the word 'for,'” a Cal State San Marcos professor tells the San Diego Union-Tribune. More»

Social networking sites have their place, but so does predecessor

(NEWSER) - Email’s had a good run, but its day is done, according to Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal. Email is an outdated form of communication, better suited to a time when we logged online and off, she argues. Now that we’re always connected, Twitter and Facebook are faster—and more fun. And, not coincidentally, they’re growing faster, according to the latest Nielsen data. More»

(AP) - Google Inc.'s Gmail service got knocked offline today in a widespread outage that affected most users for a few hours this afternoon. It wasn't immediately clear what caused the disruption, which led users to get a "502" error message. Google first posted of the problem at 3:53pm EST and says it was fixed by 5:40pm for nearly everyone. The company suffered a similar glitch in May. More»

Social network spams contacts without permission

(NEWSER) - The US’ third-largest social network is also the world’s most annoying website, Sean Gregory writes in Time. An e-mail about photos from an ex-boss lured him to Tagged, only to lead him through a confusing registration that spammed all his contacts with an informal note. “I don’t have a ‘smiley-face’-style relationship with most of my old professors,” he moans. More»