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New iConji Language For the Symbol-Minded Texter
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.
3000BC called... they want their idea back!
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
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).
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.
Actually, they worked in three different ways. Pictograms, sounds and determinants.
If you were in a "hurry", had a lack of space or artistic reasons, you could just draw the symbol for bird and be done with it.
You could also use them to describe sounds (like a modern alphabet). This would combine a few symbols into a word that could be sounded-out.
Lastly, you could use them to simply be more clear, to help _determine_ the meaning of a word. You'd spell out the word for bird and then draw a bird (and underline the bird to distinguish it from the rest).
Interesting sideline to all of this is that you can write with hieroglyphs from both left to right and right to left. Doesn't really matter which one you pick. If you want to read it, just keep an eye out for the birds again. The direction of their mouths indicate which way to read the text.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
It could maybe become useful to some degree. If you can make people think of it as a game, a challenge, maybe it will develop to the point that it will be useful. People love the artificially constrained communication of Twitter, so why not?
Yet, I would advise the initiators to read the sad story of Blissymbolics. I wanted to link to wikipedia, but they don't tell it (in fact they tell an extremely sanitized story!) It's recounted in other places, such as Arika Orkent's book "In the land of invented languages".
In brief, Bliss wanted to create an internationally intuitive symbol language, suitable for full communication. That didn't work, but by chance, a centre working with CP children came across it. These are children who have normal intelligence, but extremely few ways of expressing themselves. They were also too young to have learned to read, so they couldn't slowly spell out what they want a la Hawkins. Instead they used Bliss' symbols as a sort of rebus: One kid who wanted to go as a vampire on halloween pointed to the signs for "dark", "man", "blood", "mouth" etc.
Bliss was at first overjoyed. Then he was furious, because he found out the teachers (and the kids) used it "wrong", not according to the rules he'd set up. He threatened to sue. Eventually they were forced to settle, for a large sum. So in essence he stole money from handicapped children, but had to give up his dream of an international symbol language.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
If this means that all conversations are recorded and stored by iConji when you use their apps, it is without any doubt a deal breaker for me.
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.
Okay so McDonalds will pay to have a unique symbol in the language and in return they get data on when and how people use it.
Wait. A few questions:
- So if there is no symbol for a certain brand already licensed in the system, how do you, as a user, discuss it?
- What if I am a company that iConji disagrees with for some tedious moral/administrative reason and refuses to licence me? Could be double-plus ungood.
- What if the 'nominal fee' for my suddenly wildly-popular product is too much for me to bear or becomes irritating? Can I remove the symbol from usage? Does iConji come after me with hired goons for the cash?
- What if some other company licenses *my* symbol and uses it to track their efforts to dethrone me? Can I petition to get the symbol transferred to me?
- What if some other company licenses some sort of disparaging symbol to describe my fine product. Can I petition to get the symbol removed? Can I hire uber-lawyers and grind iConji into dust if they disagree?
All these questions will be running through the minds of company lawyers everywhere as soon as they hear of this.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.