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New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter

Posted by timothy on from the dissimilar-to-not-from dept.

billdar writes "As texting evolves into its own language, a Northern Colorado Business Review article covers an ambitious project to develop a new symbol-based language called iConji for mobile texting and online chatting. 'iConji is a set of user-created 32x32-pixel symbols that represent words or ideas, not dissimilar from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or American Sign Language.' There is an instructional video for the iPhone app and it is also integrated into Facebook." Behind this project is Kai Staats, formerly CEO of Terra Soft Solutions, the original developer of Yellow Dog Linux.

5 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. 3000BC called... by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    3000BC called... they want their idea back!

    --
    My first program:

    Hell Segmentation fault

    1. Re:3000BC called... by LunarEffect · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because Egyptian hieroglyphics actually meant something to the Egyptian people. The symbols they used were in context with how they lived and what they saw around them and I suppose they were more self explanatory to the people back then than they are to us today. If you look at the iConji symbols, you'll see that you can understand the meaning of a lot of them just by looking at them, because they are based on symbols from our every day lives, thus making them easier for us to understand. I'm sure if you invented a time machine and gave these to an ancient Egyptian scientists without an explanation or context, they'd have a hard time understanding them.

  2. There's this cool thing about letters by lolbutts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You don't need to have thousands of different glyphs available so that people can communicate. "Coffee at 4?" works fine for my uses (well, in a theoretical world where I drink coffee).

  3. "It's that simple" by ewrong · · Score: 5, Insightful

    She announces gleefully after spending nearly 2 minutes flicking through tabs and scrolling through mountains of icons to enter a message that would take most people a few seconds to type normally.

    Dumbest idea I've seen in a long time.

  4. destined to fail? by ascari · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The successful "techno-social" languages seem to emerge spontaneously in response to real needs. (Think of things like twitter's @ syntax, the web's emoticons, IRC's one letter words, even 1337-speak etc.) The very fact that this language is the fruit of an "ambitious project" to meet a need merely postulated suggests that it's destined for a life in obscurity. Nobody will bother to learn it.