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Filed under: Design, Developer, Fun, Internet, Text, Features, E-mail, Social Software

Zlango - new, improved emoticons for web and mobile

If emoticons are so 10 minutes ago for you and you like to express yourself through graphics, Zlango might be your new language of choice. Zlango is a graphical language with over 200 icons consisting of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. The colors are bright and fun and the icons themselves are witty - especially if you compare them to their smiley face replacements. Right now, you can use Zlango for the web and email, but if you're in Israel, Poland, and the Caribbean, you can use it on your mobile device. The company recently raised $12 million to take the Zlango language global. You never know, Zlango might become as ubiquitous as :).

Filed under: Fun, Web services

Ask.com adds... emoticon search?

Ask.com emoticon searchThe latest post at the Ask.com blog begins, "For a long time people have wanted the ability to search for terms and phrases on the web using non-letter (A-Z) characters. Put another way, searching using non-alphanumeric characters." This is a promising start--I've occasionally been annoyed by the fact that Google interprets almost all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces--but then things go off in a different direction: emoticons. I really wasn't aware that there were so many people crying out for a way to find the meanings of certain emoticons, but apparently there are. As a result, you can now search for :) or >:-( or :-O and Ask.com will tell you, via what it calls the Smart Answer box, what it's supposed to mean. Ask.com doesn't really say how many emoticons it knows, but it does seem to be missing some like :-[ and it also doesn't seem to differentiate between upper- and lowercase, so it interprets :-d as the same as :-D ("laughing, big smile"). It does, however, toss at least one non-emoticon into the mix, which the geeks in the audience will recognize: /. , as well as some popular acronyms like LOL and BRB. It even has WTF (uncensored!) but not, curiously, OMG.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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