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MSN symbols are a new kind of emoticon which is sweeping the internet, and the irony is that it has been available to everyone for many years. These emoticons and special characters are available now to copy and paste into your MSN names, statuses and chats – and the best part is that you don’t need to download them or upload them, just copy and paste.

MSN symbols

What is an MSN symbol? Within the character map of Windows operating systems there are lots of cool letters and characters that you can use to leave messages to other people. These include smileys that represent a wide range of different things, included the regular happy faces, but also things like music note symbols and characters that can express different moods or feelings.

In the past, people who use MSN could simply use the emotes and smilies that were installed on their computers inside the Windows Live Messenger software, so why should we use these types of symbol? The answer is simple. There is a growing move away from the official software that Microsoft provides, and towards online chat services such as Meebo. These services can’t access the emoticons that you have previously uploaded to your client, and so you are stuck with plain old boring icons.

Not any more! Now if you go over to the MSN symbols website you can find a huge number of different types of special alt character, and you are not just limited to chats. You can also put them into your little status bar to pass on further information to your buddies. This info could be the song that you’re listening to (use a music note symbol), what you’re doing (use a chess character) or perhaps where you are right now (with an airplane symbol)!

There are a number of other resources for different social networks on the site, which you can browse at your leisure. These include different fonts, or ways of controlling what you type. One example is a way of getting bold and underline in your Facebook chat boxes. The good thing about the alt codes is that you can also use these icons in your Facebook status and chats!

The possibilities really are endless, so why not try to be creative? You can also combine characters to form larger pictures, and paste them into comments on blogs or put them on your Myspace page. Try out some symbols for MSN now and find your favourite!

One man’s obsession with changing his Facebook status almost got him in hot water at his office yesterday – and his Facebook quotes mania nearly cost him his job. David Perry, who works in a bank in Central London, was fined by his employer and warned that if he continues to change his Facebook status at work during office hours then he could face disciplinary action and dismissal.

Facebook quotes

In one of the strangest court cases in recent history, it turned out that the employee had been accessing Facebook from work, usually not an offence, but after the business installed a timer on the network to see how long people had been spending on different websites it became clear that he had been on the social network for more than 75% of his day.

When quizzed about it, he claimed that he had not been actively using Facebook chat or looking at people’s wall posts, but merely staying logged in so that he could change his Facebook quote to something funny or original. This led to a heated argument with his employer, and the subsequent legal action. The court found in favour of the company and warned Mr Perry that as an employee he had a duty to do whatever the IT policy of his company suggested, even if he didn’t agree with it.

Mr Perry was unavailable for comment late night Thursday, but his Facebook status update read that he would appeal against the verdict and said that everyone should have access to funny Facebook quotes whenever they wanted.

Here’s an early New Year’s present for all fans of the Firefox browser – their mobile software, which has been in development for more than a year, is on the verge of being released. A lot of the talk in the world of browsers recently has been about Google and their Chrome offering, and so it is interesting to see Mozilla try to wrestle the momentum back from the internet giant.

It’s been a crazy few weeks in the browser world, with the introduction of Google Chrome browser extensions, and the fanfare surrounding them. Mozilla has taken a back seat to Google in the race to become the de-facto #2 in the race (behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), and so they’re trying to get back in the fight through the mobile product.

What can we expect from the Firefox mobile browser?

Mozilla want its users to have as close an experience to the desktop product as possible, and so they are trying to incorporate as many different options and settings as they can. This includes tabbed browsing (which up to this point has been sorely lacking in a vast number of mobile browsers, including RIM’s Blackberry software).

What will be similar about the mobile browser?

The tabs for the browser will be found on the left hand side of the screen, with easy access to a number of open pages. There has also been a promise from the Firefox development team that this will be fast software, and not a memory hog like some mobile addons and widgets can tend to be.

Look out for the Firefox mobile browser before the year is finished! That means within five days at the latest. Stay tuned for more browser news from RockNLoad in the future, including talk about the Google Chrome browser and its current war with Internet Explorer!

A recent survey by an analytics company has revealed that Twitter, one of the leading stars in mobile website accesibility and technology may not be as entrenched in the mobile web as we might expect. When asked about which brands they want to see on their mobile phones, respondents to this research placed the microblogging service as low as 16th, behind Weather.Com and even the dying dinosaur Myspace.

But what implications will this have for Twitter as a company and as an online brand? Is this good or bad news for the Web 2.0 superstar?

Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought

This means two things for Twitter. The first is that they clearly have a long way to go if they are to get the right amount of mobile market penetration that a service like this needs to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. This last year has seen Twitter embroiled in a number of controversies, including their site being hacked embarrassingly on a number of occasions and sensitive user data potentially stolen from their servers.

The second thing for Twitter to take from this data, on a more positive note, is that the predicted demise of their service due to Facebook’s increase in its mobile service is short sighted. Since they are not dominating the mobile world (as once suspected), they have nothing to fear from an unrelated increase in Facebook’s mobile activities. They should be more worried, perhaps, that Facebook will be able to take the ground and the initiative which they themselves may want to occupy first.

Either way, this year promises to be an interesting one in social networking, with the established brands trying to win the hearts and minds of users moving into the the new decade, and new pretenders on the horizon. The web has never looked so interesting!

An internet campaign was the impetus behind the Christmas number one single competition in the UK being won by Rage Against The Machine, and not the widely expected winner of the popular X Factor television show, Joe McElderry.

In recent years, the winner of the televised talent show has been the most popular single in the Christmas chart, usually beating its opponents by numbers ranging in the hundreds of thousands. But this year, the power of Facebook, social networking and MSN has been harnessed by a couple working from their kitchen.

Facebook and Twitter campaign wins Christmas number one in UK

The campaign began because they viewed Christmas as a sacred time, and they thought that the race for Christmas number 1 had been all but destroyed by the popoularity of the television show. With this idea in mind they created a Facebook group encouraging people to boycott buying the X-Factor single and directing people to buy the Rage Against The Machine effort instead.

The messages were sent in large part via Facebook chat, and support was also shown in people’s status messages and updates. Myspace was also leveraged in the plan to good effect, as was Twitter – with thousands of tweets during the week urging people to go out and buy the single, or download it. The Rage Against The Machine single set a new record for single sales in its first week in the UK.

With more than 600,000 tracks bought, the only true winners in this case are the record companies, who have made a bundle of money on the back of both campaigns. What is most suprising is that people were so quick to buy the RATM single which does not seem to be extremely ‘Chistmasey’ in spirit.

The power of social networking is clear when it comes to situations such as this, where mobilizing large numbers of people to act is just the click of a mouse away. It remains to be seen if this sort of mobilization is anything more than a fad, or if can be used for something more constructive such as raising money for charity in the coming months and years.