Alex Hern 

The rise and rise of emoji social networks

Three social networks have promised to revolutionise our lives by showing instead of telling
  
  

emoji
Words are so over … all-emoji conversations are the future. Photograph: Bluekat/Alamy

If it seemed like Yo, the zero-character social network, was a low/high point (delete as appropriate) of the internet, you were wrong: things can still get worse/better. Witness the rise of the emoji-based social network.

Over the course of the last two months, no fewer than three separate networks have launched promising to revolutionise our communication by focusing entirely on emoji – the small pictographic depictions that can be found in modern devices of everything from faces, both human 😄 and cat 😸, through shoes 👠 and flowers 🌺 to sad moons 🌚 and fast trains 🚆. (Although if you aren’t using a browser that can handle emoji, that sentence will look odd.)

The first to launch was Emojicate, an “Emoji only chat & social networking app” from Teesside-based Clicksco Labs. The company sees its app “as taking hieroglyphics to the modern era,” its director Nick Kendal told The Journal.

Once users have signed up to the app using their Facebook login, the only bit of real text they’ll ever see, apart from the UI, is their and their friends names. Everything else on the social network, which operates a bit like a pictogram-filled Twitter, is an emoji.

Or is it? Emojicate uses its own custom emojis, rather than relying on the built-in set included in most smartphones. That lets the app provide a greater vocabulary than it could otherwise get away with, and even offers the prospect of custom emoji, such as a clock with hands which can be turned to a specific time. At the extreme end, users can even make quasi-emojis out of the profile pictures of their friends.

The aim is clearly to come up with something that could feasibly be used for actual communication: a picture of a friend’s face, followed by a pint glass, a clock with the hands set at 7pm, and a question mark, is readily understandable as an offer of after-work drinks. But is anyone really going to be using an emoji-based social network for actual communication?

Perhaps Emojli, originating in the UK, is the real leader of emoji based social networks. Announced before Emojicate but launched afterwards, it is the purist’s network. Everything is emoji: the messages – of course – but also the interface and even the usernames. (I managed to score a coveted single-character username on the network: a pair of blue jeans 👖.) The app works more like WhatsApp than Twitter, letting users chat to each other with emoji. And this is the real deal: 100% purestrain unicode-compatible emoji.

Which, of course, makes it even more useless. Asked if the app is supposed to be a serious effort or more of a joke app, developers Matt Gray and Tom Scott say they aren’t sure of the split. “Yes, it’s a joke and, yes, we put serious effort into it but we’ve no idea which one takes priority.”

As for why their announcement was so quickly followed by two similar apps, they are a bit clearer: “It’s a really, really obvious joke.

“Seriously, the Unicode Consortium released its new emoji, and Yo came out. We’re a bit surprised there aren’t more people who connected the two!”

Then there’s Steven. That’s the name of the app, in case it’s not clear (it’s not clear at all, is it?). Steven, which is from the US, takes the rough idea of an emoji social network and fleshes it out into something that could feasibly be useful – half life-logging app like Facebook-owned Moves, half photo-sharing social network like Facebook-owned Instagram.

The app ambiently tracks users’ locations, and gives them the ability to take and share photos. For some, particularly those without an active friends list, that’s an opportunity to do life logging, building a photo-based history of where they’ve been; but for others, it’s a lighter-still take on the photo sharing aspects of Instagram.

And why not? A quick look at the average Instagram feed reveals the network is largely Emoji anyway. Maybe taking the text away could improve the service?

But if all these pictograms are getting you down – it’s almost like reading, after all, and the whole point of Emoji was to not have to do that anymore – never fear: the original zero-content social network is still around. And with more than 100m Yos sent, you won’t be alone.

Emoji: the first truly global language?

 

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