Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Gmail Emojis

Google at their Japanese blog (a couple of days ago as well as in January) announced support for emoji for Japan, and later other markets, BusinessWeek reports. Emoji, which according to Wikipedia literally means “picture characters,” are like advanced emoticons – small images such as “thumbs up” or “punch” or “heartbreak” to get a point across. Google Talk already has a limited range of emoticons (and there are hacks to get more smileys into Google Talk or into Gmail), but emoji are more wide-ranged than that.

The emojis shown here are from other applications, via Tim Bray and Gree, illustrating the wide emoji range as well as the differences among vendors and applications.

Now if anyone speaking Japanese can help shed light on what exactly the Google Japan blog posts says, and whether the feature is currently live or still being rolled out, it would help. The screenshots at the far top and below are from Google Japan, showing emoji displayed within a Gmail message & subject (sent from “...@ezweb.ne.jp”), as well as a mobile mail interface. I can’t tell for sure, but an automated translation seems to suggest that the Gmail emoji feature is live already, and consists of rendering the icons when you receive email from a mobile phone, and also support for emoji when writing email using Gmail clients on certain mobile phones.

Also see Japanese text smileys.

[Thanks Pd!]

Gmail Emojis by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

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