Gmail gets cute with animated emoticons
By Dave Jeyes
When Gmail was first introduced, accounts were prized as a simple and elegant interface for easing the pain of managing piles of emails. It wasn’t until much later that Google added any emoticon support at all, but with today’s release of dozens of ghastly animated emoticons, the developers might just have gone too far.
Last November Google released image emoticons as an upgrade to its original emoticon support which would simply turn a smile or frown on its side. The images represented a fairly limited set of standard emoticons and were simple, friendly and relatively unobtrusive.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about the horrific array of 1997-style animated images that are showing up in Gmail inboxes around the world today. Examples below range from colored smiley faces to a lobster, monkey and musical microphone, half of the new icons are completely nonsensical.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to an occasional smiley to illustrate a joke if need be. At times communicating via text can cause a message to lose its originally intended effect, especially in terms of sarcasm. But only occasionally and only if need be.
I’m glad that Gmail is getting a little extra attention from developers. Gmail Labs’ recently released Mail Goggles are hilarious if nothing else. I just want features that won’t encourage my fellow Gmailers to befoul my inbox by painting it to look like a 15 year-old girl’s Myspace page.
For example, how about fixing the contacts uploader so as not to mangle the records of millions of iPhone and G1 owners that now have the ability, if not necessity to sync with Gmail? The current contact management capability in Gmail is a joke, but these animated icons are an actual feature announcement and clearly not.
Now, I’ll admit that there may be a time when a well-placed smiling face or frothy beer in a message will help to illustrate a point. However, by and large I’ll offer the same advice to Gmail users as parents of toddlers around the Globe: use your words, dears.
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on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 8:59 am
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Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
Stumble It!
October 24th, 2008
Ok Mr. Scrooge
October 24th, 2008
Ironically, I’m getting ads on Blorge to download 1000’s of the ugliest emoticons around.
October 24th, 2008
Gotta love contextual ad targeting. It’s mocking my attempts at sarcasm while contributing a heavy dose of irony.
October 25th, 2008
Oh yes, very funny Dave, we’ll be keeping an eye on you.
October 27th, 2008
Hear him! Google and its cloud apps have some major benefits, but the contact management in Gmail IS lame.
You can’t search contacts in any field except name and email address??!! Outlook is pretty lame, too, but is way beyond Gmail Contacts.
I’m sure hoping the G1 (got mine on order) is not going to be hampered by this issue.