A company called Over the Sun is launching what they over-hype as a “revolutionary social networking application” called iConji Messenger. Touted to bring the new way to communicate with friends across town or around the world, the new application/service replaces text with a vocabulary of 32×32 pixel pictographs whose meanings are translated into several languages.
Each of the 32×32 pixel images holds a single meaning, such as “sports car” or a dual meaning such as “food” plus “to eat.” What’s great about it, is that Over the Sun hasn’t created every image in the library — rather they rely on the community to make some of the pictographs. In that sense, each character carries the author’s name, a brief story of its creation, and user generated data such as location and notes, and if desired, designation as a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb.
iConji comes with initial 1185 characters, each translated into English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese; with Turkish and Swahili in progress.
At the moment, iConji is an “iPhone thing” only, and is also available as a free Facebook and web browser application. I’ve no doubts plans to port the app to other platforms is in works as we speak, otherwise iConji would loose its international appeal…
iConji ($0.99) [iTunes link]