Today, July 17, is World Emoji Day, created by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge. If you want to celebrate but you're no good at incorporating emoji -- those cute little picture-characters representing words -- into your regular communication, you're in luck.
Now there's a handy-dandy emoji translator you can install as a Chrome browser extension to instantly transform words on a website into emoji. A product of Google developer Monica Dinosaurescu, Emoji Translate popped up on Product Hunt earlier this week.
I've just installed the translator. It's time to celebrate World Emoji Day.
I navigate over to a story I wrote earlier this week about an acqui-hire by software company Workday. I click the appropriate button -- a smiling cat with hearts for eyes -- at the top right corner of Chrome.
The results are pretty cute. See if you can understand the translated version of the first paragraph of my post:
Publicly traded 👤 capital management software company Workday is announcing today that it has acquired Upshot, 🅰️ startup that developed 🅰️ mobile app that allowed 👤 to make natural-language voice queries 🔛 💽 in customer-relationship management 🔧. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
I check out another recent story, about the shutdown of chat app Kato.im, and turn on Emoji Translate. This time, I notice a whole lot of emoji in the blurb about Kato from our VBProfiles database. This one is more puzzling than my lead about Workday:
Kato is fixing the ⚠️ of ⛳ 🏣 - enabling 👥 to communicate faster and ➕ efficiently, reduce 💌 overload and easily access their organizational 📖. Kato brings the 🔋 of text, voice and 📼 to... 📖 ➕ »
The tool isn't perfect, though. When I pop into my Feedly I notice a whole lot of blank boxes.
Still, I must say this is pretty entertaining. Happy Emoji Day!