As someone who loves using emoticons, I'm going to have to say yeas. If I'm to be honest, I was very confused when someoned used ")))" on me. We like to put eyeballs on it :) If you want a list of smiles, I could provide some. I ran across some people that didn't know what they were ^^

Yes, it's true. When I see a ) by itself, I just see a punctuation mark and I look backwards for the opening parenthesis, (. If I don't see it, I assume it was supposed to be there. The sequence of two punctuation marks :) is impossible in correct English, so even when I first saw it for the first time--in the 1980s!--I knew it wasn't punctuation. Someone had to explain to me that it was a smiley-face on its side.