Zlango is a company that took 200 little icons and made a language out of them, so you can send this shit over SMS rather than actual text. They have taken $12M in venture financing to build this testament to human engineering prowess.

Love Is Over

Okay, I wouldn't be so antagonistic if these guys had stayed where they belong: in the mobile space. Enough people are making a fortune from cell phones because nobody knows what these "services" cost, and you end up with a daily horoscope SMS message that costs you $60/mo. Great - I'm all for preying on idiots, but now these guys be steppin' all up in my internets.

So they come out with this service, called Zlango Composer, where you can type some shit in to their Flash app, it will convert it to Zlango's picture language, and you can then e-mail that to somebody. Well, that's just fantastic. I wonder what academic research literature they had to consult for this one.

200 Words To Freedom

Zlango's lexicon is limited to about 200 words, because that's how many little icons they have. I couldn't find the icon for "fail" in their vocabulary, so I had to write my way around it to produce an example:

Good thing it's subtitled, or you'd have no fucking clue what that says. It gets more and more abstract, too. See if you can guess what word this symbol represents:

And it's not "cigarette" or "smoke". Good fucking luck.

IDK, MY BFF JILL?

Allegedly, they're going to start adding user-generated content, too. More icons, books and videos (what?) and Cafe Press style merchandise (seriously, what the fuck?). Also, Nokia will be preloading Zlango onto their handsets. Fine. Keep it on cell phones - but anyone who gets one of these messages via e-mail will be dumber for having read it.