Attention online artisans who wish to work exclusively within the medium of emoji: there is a new social network that you really must check out. Emoj.li, set to launch soon on iOS with other platforms to follow, will be so thoroughly all-emoji that even your screen name has to be made up of the keyboard icons. You can even pre-register now. If you’re mad that you waited too long to get a grownup-sounding Gmail account and now you’re saddled for life with this convoluted mishmash of your first and last names plus weird punctuation, this is your chance to jump on a winning combo of rockets, panda bears, and Easter Island moai.
As the disembodied British voices in the accompanying promotional video intone, social networks are “broken.” They’re full of spam and hashtags and trolls (and this lady). The video promises that this isn’t satire (a claim somewhat undermined by Emoj.li’s makers confession to Salon that it’s partly a joke, although they are highly skilled tech people). Still, 45,000 people have already signed up – maybe because it’s considerably more expressive than Yo and has way fewer rants about the Supreme Court than Facebook.
The only downside is that, since Emoji.li will obviously be huger than huge, it probably won’t take long for them to accrue $17 billion in valuation and orchestrate a terrifying experiment on millions of users to make them feel all sad-face without realizing why. But until that happens, we’ll be birthday cake, manicure, and happy pink octopus!