Microsoft just submitted a patent about those in the US. Here's what it says:
http://appft1.uspto.gov/....
Those terms describe quite exactly the use that's been made of it for years.
We finally had to admit Microsoft could implement in their systems and apps concepts others had invented first, so they could make money out of it.
Yet use the patent system to lock things others offered to the use of a whole community, really beats us.
Who would say no to a company whose economical power could earn them a place in the G8 ?
[Upd.] In fact, it is more precisely about personalized emoticons and how to transfer them from one user to another. This is a boundary to what Microsoft want to have patented, yet here's the reaction of the Open source community via Mark Taylor (source PC Inpact):
It seems we live nowadays in a world where the most laughable of paranoid attempts of commercial control on mere social concepts has become the job of an army of lawyers, in the hands of one the most powerful companies on Earth
