twikao

Twikao turns your smiling mug into (^_^)

How you feeling today? (^_^)/ or (T_T)? Perhaps somewhat (=_=)?

If the above leaves you a tad (?_?), you're not up on your Japanese emoticons. But you can soon get up to snuff with Twikao, an app that automatically converts your mugshot into expressive symbols.

Japanese kaomoji (literally, "face letters") differ from Western smileys in several ways. For one, they're read vertically instead of horizontally, so that the brackets in the kaomoji above represent the sides of a face, and the symbols within are eyes and a mouth. For instance, a "T" is a watering eye, and (T_T) is crying.

Another feature of kaomoji is their wild expressiveness. The vertical form lends itself to a myriad of cartoonish little faces and combinations like \(^_^)/, a kind of mini-ode to joy. … Read more