Google recently created a whole new range of animated "rich emoticons" for users of its e-mail and online chat services. They're really quite amusing, and (as their plainer cousins have done for years) they help give our staccato online conversations a measure of the emotional depth that our facial expressions allow us to convey while talking face to face.
Although facial expressions have obvious social utility, scientists have long wondered why they originally developed. Expressions don't just help us communicate (which is already an evolutionary advantage)