I actually rarely "lol" but if I do, it's because I actually did. And I generally only use it in live chat situations. But if I've typed "lol" it's because I'm laughing, out loud, for real, yes.
There's a young at my office who ends every written sentence in casual correspondence with "lol". That drives me nuts, although I do understand that he's not confident enough in his written communication skills that he trusts people will know he's joking when he writes something. Hence, "lol" at the end of each sentence to let you know he's kidding around. He's an actor and a improv comic in his spare time. You'd think he'd know that I realize he jokes around quite a bit.
The rest of text speak gets on my nerves in forum-writing situations, including Facebook. My best friend developed a bad habit of typing messages to me containing "ur". It bothered me so much, I now permanently refer to her as "ur" notwithstanding the context. I use it as a substitute for "you". (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's supposed to be short for "you are" but I don't care. If you can type "ur" you can type "you are". As someone else pointed out earlier in this thread, no one is so busy that they must save milliseconds of time.)
Therefore, I write sentences to her such as, "How are ur today?" She caught on really quickly.
I understand text-speak writing for actual text messages. You are restricted to space and message size before it spills into a second message. Plus the tiny keyboards get on my nerves very, very quickly, so I can see the advantage. On Message boards or in e-mail, though? Not a chance. I actually have to slow down and stop and think in order to *not* type out the whole word. I touch-type; it goes quickly.
And yes, I perceive people who write posts or e-mails in text-speak as 1) not too bright, and/or 2) too lazy to be bothered to communicate clearly with me. And if you can't be bothered to speak clearly, then I can't be bothered trying to discuss anything with you. It's too difficult to try and figure out what they're trying to say, because, in my mind, when I read the letters, I "hear" the sounds of the letters and not the words those letters are supposed to stand for.
At my office, though, jokingly, we routinely say "brb" to each other when leaving a room.
