You’ve likely already seen it, but it’s still a little unbelievable to me that Gmail included feces as one of its emoticons. If you haven’t seen it, go ahead, check it out, it’s there (the very last one on the bottom row). And now, we’re getting more emoticons — a whole hell of a lot more.
A new feature in Gmail Labs, Extra Emoji, adds dozens of these different colorful icons as possibilities to send via Gmail. Emoji is the Japanese term used for emoticons, which are hugely popular in that country. So much so that support for them was added to only the Japanese version of the iPhone. And it’s the Japanese who actually made this Gmail Labs feature as well. Specifically, “all of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission,” Google writes on its blog.
I’m still digging through all of them to see if there is anything as interesting as the pile of crap one. I haven’t found anything yet, but the bomb and gun ones are pretty cool.
