Are you leaving work early to fly off somewhere with your sweetie? You could Tweet that to your followers on Twitter, or you could tell them, "I'm going to ? out of work early today and hop a ? to Montego Bay with my true ♥."

Adding symbols to Tweets used to involve remembering a whole bunch of keystroke combinations but thanks to TwitterKeys, created by the folks at The Next Web Blog, all you have to do now is cut and paste.

Just drag the TwitterKeys bookmarklet to your toolbar and next time you're looking for a symbol, just click the link to open the directory. Find the symbol you like, copy it (Control + C), then paste it (Control + V) into your Tweet. Pretty sweet.

Two things to note: TweetDeck users will need to change the apps defult font setting to international/utf8 in order to use TweetKeys. Also, Mac users will recognize many of these symbols from the Special Characters set found on OS X. While not all of those characters will work cleanly in Twitter, the ones selected for TwitterKeys will.

There must be something in the water over at Mountain View, because it seems that a day doesn't pass without at least a few significant Google updates. Today we've got enhanced emoticons in Gmail chat, support for group chats, and the company's also experimenting with the idea of letting users vote on search results.

The first update is pretty self explanatory. Pretty much every instant messaging application on the face of the earth (including Google Talk) has support for funny looking emoticons, so it was only a matter of time before you saw them start to pop up in email-based chat clients. If you've grown fond of Google's little rotating :-), fear not. It's still there as the default smiley.

You can also now initiate group chats with multiple Gmail or GTalk users by clicking the "options" button and entering a list of people you want to invite.

Google is also testing a new way to refine search results, by asking users to get involved in the ranking process. The project is part of Google Experimental, which means that you'll need to sign up for participation. Once you're signed up, you'll notice two little icons next to search results. Click the up arrow to indicate that you like the result, or the X button to bury it. Right now, the results will only be stored in your own settings, so you can consider this a step towards personalized search. But if this catches on, the Google of the future could use a combination of computers and real live people to determine the most accurate search results.

[via Googlified]

The New York Times ran a lengthy article on emoticons this weekend. It's a must read for anyone who can decipher this symbol ~(_8^(I), or for anyone who can't but would like to.

While the Times gives a brief history of the emoticon, with the first modern usage traced back to 1982, the juicy bits involve the creep of emoticons from casual conversations into the professional arena. For example, if you're writing someone to let them know that a business deal worth thousands or millions of dollars is about to fall through, a frowny face just isn't going to have the same impact as a phone call.

We're betting that a lot of Download Squad readers grew up with emoticons and don't have to turn their head sideways to decipher any but the most complex smileys. But have you noticed yourself wanting to type a quick smiley, wink, or frown into a message to your boss?

Given that sarcasm and other nuances are hard to get across using nothing but text, emoticons offer a sort of shortcut. And when you're typing a note to a friend in a hurry, that's probably OK. But sometimes it's worth taking the long way to say something that's worth saying.

What do you think? Are emoticons the downfall of human civilization as we know it, an evolutionary step in written communication, or something in between?

The latest post at the Ask.com blog begins, "For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters." This is a promising start--I've occasionally been annoyed by the fact that Google interprets almost all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces--but then things go off in a different direction: emoticons. I really wasn't aware that there were so many people crying out for a way to find the meanings of certain emoticons, but apparently there are. As a result, you can now search for :) or >:-( or :-O and Ask.com will tell you, via what it calls the Smart Answer box, what it's supposed to mean. Ask.com doesn't really say how many emoticons it knows, but it does seem to be missing some like :-[ and it also doesn't seem to differentiate between upper- and lowercase, so it interprets :-d as the same as :-D ("laughing, big smile"). It does, however, toss at least one non-emoticon into the mix, which the geeks in the audience will recognize: /. , as well as some popular acronyms like LOL and BRB. It even has WTF (uncensored!) but not, curiously, OMG.