Following closely on the heels of Google Labs releases like Mail Goggles and Canned Responses, the Gmail team has announced another feature, and it's sure to make you smile. Or perhaps more accurately, make your email smile. That's right. Gmail now has graphical emoticons.

But wait, there's more: some of the options are animated.

In addition to the Gmail emoticons, a new set has been added to chat, as well.

So, thanks to the Gmail engineers, you now have the ability to automatically send graphic smilies to anyone who manages to correctly answers math questions in the wee-small hours of Saturday morning.

Isn't technology great?

Smirk is the perfect narcissistic video service and a ton of fun. The service allows you to create video emoticons directly from your webcam. Moods that you can create a video for range from bummed to awesome. The service hooks into your webcam to allow you to record a video or a mood for up to 3 seconds. Don't worry, you can rerecord a video if you make a mistake. You can also share your moods with friends via a url, GIF avatar, or an embed code. You can see the moods of other Smirk users by heading to the Smirk homepage and clicking on a video. Special effects for videos will be coming soon.

Great Start With Room for Improvement

Working your way around Smirk can be a bit confusing. The entire site is displayed in Flash. Because of this, when you rerecord any moods you may have to refresh the page a few times in order to see the correct video. Once you start recording for a mood you cannot delete the recording. You only have the option to rerecord the video, which we weren't really happy with.

What would be a great feature for Smirk to implement is to allow users to swap videos for various moods. We're also hoping there will be more moods in the future or the option for a custom mood that users can record and name. I'd love to have my own "awesomesauce" video emoticon.

Funny and Easy

All in all, Smirk is a fun and easy service. Signing up for Smirk was simple and quick, requiring only a username, email address, and password. Your video moods are your profile so no extra information is necessary. However, integration with Twitter and FriendFeed in the future would be a pretty neat. This way we can keep our friends up-to-date when we change videos. If you're looking for a fun and simple video service, we highly recommend giving Smirk a shot.