People call the little pictures that you send to your friends many things – I call them Emotins. Emotins can show a lot fo different feelings, for example smiling faces and joy, or anger and ridicule. There is a wide range of key-presses and clicks to show emotins in your chats, either via downloading them in a pack or with ones that are pre-installed in your software.
The first chat program that had emotins was ICQ, back in the ealry 1990s. The possible emotin combinations were simple and the number of pictures was quite small. The first was a simple smiley face and it shows up whenever you type a colon and a bracket 
What a classic! It brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people who finally could show some funny faces when they chatted (not like in IRC, which was all in plain text with no pictures).
AOL emotins were famous for being a fun way of communicating with other friends on AOL, but not with people who weren’t on AOL at that time. That meant that people had to use other programs to chat with their friends…enter Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger. That’s for another day though…
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little story about emotins!