Some of you may have spotted a new Facebook chat feature today, as the social network has added a pop-out emoticons box to the existing chat window.

Some emoticons had been available in the past, but you’d have had to have known the appropriate character string in order to make anything display itself correctly. With this latest update there are 21 different emoticons in the menu to choose from, including the archetypal Facebook ‘Like’ symbol:

You can even send an icon displaying a minimised picture of a friend’s profile picture – simply enter the person’s Facebook vanity URL into double square brackets and send it as you would normal chat message. So for my image, I’d type “[[a.d.k.robertson]]” into the chat box.

It’s hard to argue that this is of the greatest importance in the grand scheme of things, and will do little for Facebook by way of pumping up its beleaguered share price, but I’m sure that for a number people this will be just the ticket. And as TechCrunch pointed out, with Facebook looking to explore supervised access for under-13s, emoticons are already a widely used mode of communication for the younger generations, so it makes sense to integrate them at some point.

Do you have a favourite emoticon?