Contractions: the new form of shorthand "speech"

Have you ever stop to look at the language used in the many Internet environments dedicated to human interface? say chat rooms, multiplayer games and other such multiuser communities? it's an entirely new form of language, one that is merely a reduction of frequently used phrases and words, contracted into as few letter (not even words) as possible.

Some of the most comon ones are:
LOL = Laughs Out Lod
AFK = Away From Keyboard
BRB = Be Right Back
GTG = Got to Go (Which in itself is a variation of I have to go)
THX = Thanks (Contraction of Thank You)
K = OK (And it's unuasual to find a two letter word reduced even further)

There are still other variations on all of these, and it's funny to think that things that ten or fifteen years ago would have been saved as acronyms for companies and agencies, has become everyday language between millions of Internet users.