As a part of its “It’s Time for Skype” marketing campaign, Skype announced today the “Skype Humoticons” app for Facebook. The announcement came on Skype’s Big Blog, where Francie Strong, director of global marketing at Skype, detailed the thought behind this strange (and seemingly pointless) app.
The humoticons app allows users to put their face into a circle and, well, make faces. Users can use images they already have on Facebook, or they can use their webcam to generate humoticons. For really ambitious humoticon fans, the option to use up to 5 pictures to create a low-quality .gif animation is available. Once the humoticon is finished it can be posted to a user’s Facebook page or shared using its URL.
What are humoticons for, you ask? I honestly don’t know. Strong suggests users attempt to emulate classic emoticons such as a smiley face or a wink. From the blog post:
“Or just freestyle it and do whatever you want to express the way you’re feeling. Because nothing can replace the look on your face.”
Any member of Facebook person who wants to try out the humoticon app can do so on the Facebook “Create your own humoticon” page. If you don’t want to enable a marketing campaign app on your Facebook profile, I don’t blame you. Luckily for you, I’ve already been the guinea pig and tried out the app. You can see the results above, where I have created what is clearly an “unsure bewilderment” humoticon. Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.