How to display the secret animated stickers on Hangouts

Very few people take full advantage of all the features of Google’s IM service, which has been receiving continual updates and improvements to both its web client and its different mobile versions. One of the latest novelties on Hangouts is a new batch of animated stickers for your conversations, which will appear, Easter egg-style, when you type certain words or phrases. Here’s a list of all of them.

• Woohoo
• Woot
• Yay!! (at least two exclamation points)
• Hahahaha
• Hehehehe
• Lmao
• Rofl
• Happy birthday

Except in certain cases (like the happy birthday one), the animation that will pop up will be a random pick from among a dozen stickers. All these combinations come on top of the Easter eggs that appeared a few months ago:

• /ponies A My Little Pony will pass across the chat window.
• /ponystream The same as the previous one but with an entire herd.
• /pitchforks A group of pixelated characters will run around the window.
• /Bikeshed Lets you change the color of the chat window background.
• /Shydino A little dinosaur will hide behind a house.
• The Konami Code: The sequence up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-Enter will make the window background morph into a forest.