Your point - that the software was at its peak when it was called MSN Messenger - is exemplified by the fact that most people still call it MSN Messenger. It seems even teens, who've probably never seen this brand out in the wild still call it MSN.
A thing that is so serendipitously weird about the program is that it has the best IM emoticons of any IM client of all time.
I think they since replaced the icons with some new eye sores, but it was fascinating how the smilies in some way revolutionized the way I and others communicated, because they really helped create a good mood and served the purpose of disambiguation.
Smilies and emoticons aren't a gimmick, which some erroneously believe; it's just that they have to be designed properly before they can serve a purpose. For one, people have to want them because of their design, and second, they have to convey the user's mood unambiguously. Interet forums (AKA bulletin boards) often live or die by them, because the worst-case scenario results in the must insufferable atmosphere of bitter curmudgeons.
Developers at everywhere from Facebook, Skype, Google, and Tapbots don't seem to get this and just include for them for reasons they probably don't know themselves.
The smilies were actually a huge part of what made the older version of Messenger great, and for more important reasons that people would think. It was the main litmus test when I compared to competitors; none of them got it. I believe it was also fairly novel in introducing the "X is typing a message" feature, but I could be wrong on that.
It wasn't perfect by any means; the X Messenger Plus extension became mandatory fairly early on: http://www.msgplus.net.
Whenever and wherever I possibly could, I always disabled graphical emoticons in favor of the text-only versions. I don't know why--maybe it's the same reason I turn off HTML email and do all of my programming and most of my writing and notekeeping in vim in a terminal window. Suffice it to say, it's quite weird to see someone wax poetic about the minute details of designing one of my least favorite features. It's so strange that even though I can't detect a bit of irony in your post, I'm still not sure whether or not this is some kind of elaborate joke.
it's quite weird to see someone wax poetic about the minute details of designing one of my least favorite features
Someone has a different opinion to you. This is not rare, and should not be surprising. Turning off HTML e-mails, using vim... you are in a tiny, tiny minority. Nothing wrong with that, but don't go around thinking that people are being ironic because they don't agree with you.
Oh I know--that's why I mentioned all that stuff, to point out what you're saying--but this is still Hacker News, and it seems a bit incongruous to see that particular opinion stated so intelligently on HN.
Smilies are great for disambiguation, as people have some innate tendency to assume the most negative interpretation of a comment online; look at the culture of manufactured outrage in the U.S. over absurd interpretation of what people say in the public space. Of course, smilies like ":D" and such are rarely useful, and I prefer communicating in text to smilies when possible. (My Twitter feed barely has any smilies.)
I can see why you would usually turn them off, because they are often misused and superfluous, but text-based smilies usually serves the purpose perfectly well.
Go to a community like Quarter to Three[1] and behold the surliest community that has ever been suffered onto mankind. Emoticons do wonders in forum-based (BB-based) communities to lighten the mood.
Text is very poor for conveying tone, as your response and the ensuing conversation conveniently illustrate. Even if text weren't poor at the job, people would lack the time and skill to wield it convincingly.
Don't get me wrong, I hate smilies for the most part. I still see their purpose, when relevant, though.
If people use them, they are useful, but my feeling on smileys has always been negative. The vast bulk of the time they are used to disambiguate a joke or sarcasm. But telling people you are joking kills the humor anyway, so just write plainly.
Emoticons/smilies and such do emerged for the very reason you say, disambiguation of things that could be taken out of context in mail form.
Note that this disambiguation does not necessarily mean "making less ambiguous".
A smiley could also mean "make what I say more ambiguous, because I mean it in an ambiguous way (e.g half joking)".
So, it's only disambiguation in a meta-level: making what should be ambiguous more ambiguous, and what should be taken literally more literal.
>Smilies are great for disambiguation, as people have some innate tendency to assume the most negative interpretation of a comment online; look at the culture of manufactured outrage in the U.S. over absurd interpretation of what people say in the public space.
I think "manufactured" is the key word here (that and hypocrisy).
People used to be more vigilant about that kind of hypocrisy, but only if it's by people on the right (i.e a strict republican "man of god" that's caught red-handed with a prostitute, not on the "left", e.g a blog post in the lines of "Booth babes at a tech expo, that is so sexist" by someone who's idea of fun is Hooters).
Being Swiss myself, I can for the life of me not figure out why you should be troubled by this fact. Do you feel threatened by us? I understand you're worried about the state of science and education in the U.S., but on the other hand you cannot honestly assume that 100% of scientific and technologic breakthroughs are performed on 6.1%[1] of the world's land mass?
I've been living in the U.S. for 3 months now, and the "American exceptionalism" assumption sometimes gets on my nerves..
Not as much threatened as forlorn about our seeming decline in status as a scientific hub for the world. I find solace somewhat in the breakthroughs we've discovered and developed over the years, but must sadly concede that, hey, people are doing sexy science-y stuff all over the place.
We can't even come together for universal healthcare coverage, so maybe we don't deserve to be the lead dog of the sled.
Mobile learning is the future! Imagine everybody spending their idle time learning new skills (languages or anything else) instead of playing angry birds! Additionally, mobile learning is accessible to a larger percentage of the world population than probably any other kind of learning. It's going to change the world.
Based on my extra-curricular time learning Portuguese for the last year, I think Skype and Google Translate (as a slightly more useful dictionary) are a thousand times the transformational language learning tool than any of these apps are. No app or comprehensive program really impresses me too much (and I've tried most, including Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur) because most are boring, inhuman, and lack enough content. The most useful app I've used is Anki, but that's just a general purposes SRS rote learning tool for drilling.
The ability to get on Skype with someone from another country though is really a game changer, because there is no app that comes close to the ability to communicate with another human being, which is ultimately what language learning is about. There seems to be a fight or flight mechanism that forces you to adapt and try your best to understand the bare minimum of what the person's saying that just isn't there with software. I started Skyping with people from sharedtalk (based on a comment here) knowing very little Portuguese but just memorizing "can you type that?" and "can you repeat that?" and I felt I moved a lot more quickly than I did with Rosetta Stone. It did help that many Brazilians are eager for an English practice partner.
While I try to combine a wide variety of learning techniques, my experience and the experience of various other's that I've read is that "apps" to teach you a language are a lot less useful than books, native podcasts, TV shows, music, and Skype. So while I think that the internet has totally transformed language learning, I'm less convinced that any software explicitly for that purpose has.
As someone who taught himself Brazilian Portuguese without apps or classes, I have to agree with you. It's all about the variety of approaches and the consistency with which you teach yourself.
As for the parent, if people aren't already learning via other existing media and/or methods, I highly doubt they will all of a sudden start, given the advent of apps. Mobile learning is the future because it's ubiquitous, not because it's game-changing.
This is actually one thing I've always been wondering about as a non-native speaker when reading English headlines. Is there any reason newspapers prefer this style? It sounds weird to me.
It's weird for us native speakers too, don't worry.
My guess is that it puts the information in the title in order from the most eye-grabbing to the least. (The more readable "Google Execs and James Cameron unveil Asteroid Mining Venture" puts the holy shit part of the title at the end.)
I don't think it's a meaningless number. Maybe I want to know compare the frequency of two terms, then Google's estimate of results is pretty useful. On the other hand result number 230,000,000 is certainly not useful. Well, it might be a little useful, but there are 229,999,999 documents that Google thinks are more useful to me, so it is a reasonable optimization by Google to not actually prepare a results page for it.
When I'm trying to choose between two alternative spelling or phrasings of a concept, I'll frequently google the two alternatives I'm considering to get a sense for which is more common.
Maybe the user wants to find out if there is more weather data for Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra by comparing the number of results. Sydney has the lead, btw.
Maybe they do, and number of results will give that information. But how does one verify authenticity of that number. For example saying that there were 102,345,290 results returned for a query is of no use if you cannot browse to x result. Google could have just picked these numbers out of proverbial hat. Maybe they already do :)
This post made me laugh, and I sure hope that's what it was supposed to do. It happens more circa once per week to me that somebody "has already done all the legwork" and only needs me to design and code "the app that will make us rich"..
