(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
Christina Lucey
Emoticons, Kaomoji, Emoji, Stickers — A Short History
Cats! And foxes! And doges, oh my! How did we get to a point where we could communicate by sending small animated waving foxes curled up on cars? Have you ever peeked over someone’s shoulder on the bus to see them having a conversation entirely made up of stickers?
The idea may seem ludicrous at first, but the concept has been around almost as long as Ryan Gosling has been alive and has persisted despite its humble beginnings.
ASCII-based emoticons were reportedly first used on a Carnegie Mellon computer science bulletin board in 1982 (in a very hilarious tone, may I add: “I propose [the] following character sequence for joke markers:”). From there they caught on, evolved, and diverged. Western emoticons are read sideways :-) whereas you read Japanese-style emoticons (kaomoji) without tilting your head (*^▽^*). Another interesting difference is that expression of Western emoticons is usually in the depiction of the mouth, whereas the kaomoji is all about the eyes. Mysterious!
Thirteen years after the first smiley, we were still coming to terms with our newfound abilities to communicate using snippets of text and characters. In 1995, an economist named Shigetaka Kurita, working for Japanese mobile provider Docomo, determined that the ability to send small simple images could be the next step. He came up with a set of emojis himself that he always assumed professional designers would polish. “Yeah… these are a little ugly, honestly,” he recently said of them. They were wildly successful.
Only very recently have we seen this concept evolve into the form of stickers, with messaging app Line getting much of the credit for that. It makes sense—there’s only so much you can convey in a 12x12 pixel image, but when you start to experiment with characters, animation, and a lot more real estate to capture subtle detail, the results are impressive.
The beauty of written electronic communication is it allows people to communicate cheaply, quickly, and asynchronously (multiple conversations at once!) — but the human element is often absent. Especially in business communication.
At Yammer, changing the way people communicate at work is what gets us out of bed in the morning. And as a PM I get very excited when I get to completely geek out and translate it into something our customers can benefit from. ORZ I can’t say much more for now, but we do have a special product announcement coming soon…
Christina Lucey is a Senior Product Manager at Yammer. She’s just returned from a 4-month stint in London, where she picked up a bad tea habit (ﾉﾟ0ﾟ)ﾉ~貝
