What is the back story or history behind Facebook's 'Putnam' smiley?

Question

Please explain the reason for and back story to Facebook's hidden PUTNAM smiley (:putnam:).

Here it is:

Answer 1

Chris Putnam is a software engineer at Facebook. Here is his blog and here is an interview with the guy.

I don't know why he merited an easter-egg emoticon over other potential candidates. I'm not sure there has to be a reason.

In 2006, Chris Putnam hacked Facebook, changing thousands of profiles to a MySpace style. He was then hired by Facebook.

Answer 2

As stated already, Chris Putnam works for Facebook and no doubt put the :putnam: smiley in there as a little Easter Egg.

I think the idea for the :putnam: smiley is to use it when mentioning an iconic figure or an extremely intelligent / successful person.

This probably stems from how Chris Putnam got the job at Facebook. He hacked in to Facebook profile page and created a viral worm that spread to most users. He then changed the CSS so that all profile pages looked like MySpace.