While Gmail has had some emoticons for a while now, they have added a new slew of them, some with motion.

While these are mildly amusing, they seem rather unnecessary to normal email.  We did run a test of sending an email from Gmail with the new emoticons in it, and they did carry across systems, but I won’t pull any punches in that I hope these don’t catch on.  Reading email is enough of a chore for me during the day, but adding bouncing, moving images is just going to make it that much less fun.