Facebook emoji: Status-update emoticons are bad for privacy, good for advertisers

In theory, Facebook could try to derive the same information from your plain-English status updates by running them through natural-language processing algorithms. But turning informal, colloquial language into usable data is really hard. Even the smartest computers today are terrible at detecting irony, interpreting slang, or drawing inferences about peoples mental states based on their words. Google has some of its best minds working on that problem, and Facebook is clearly working on it too. But emoticons, along with hashtags, photo tags, "about" pages, and even the ubiquitous like button, appear to be part of a grand Facebook strategy to get its users to do a lot of the hard work themselves.