WeChat version 8.0 brings new ways to chat, let’s talk about emoticons

Tencent has officially launched WeChat version 8.0 these days, making the software more user-friendly and fun to use. Among these changes, the most talked about online are the full-screen emoticons such as "explosion" and "fireworks", which allow people to chat in new ways. For netizens, emoticons are an important part of online communication and also carry the memories of the Internet.

Let’s talk about the classification of emoticons

Emoticons

Emoticons include more than just pictures. The earliest (electronic) emoticons used in history should be emoticons. Regarding the first emoticon, the one that is most widely circulated on the Internet is “:-)”, which was used by Professor Scott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University on an early electronic bulletin board in 1982. The simple sequence of characters is constructed into a smiling face image that is easy to understand at a glance. Emoticons became an important way for people to express their opinions in that era.

Even in the information age, emoticons have developed into a global emoticon culture with their interesting style. They have become an essential function of input method software, a chat status of various social software, and a popular symbol in chat boxes.

Picture emoticons

The earliest popular emoticon package should be the emoji emoticon created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. It presented more intuitive and easy-to-understand emoticons through 12*12 pixel images, and then became a new generation of the world's common language under the joint promotion of PC chat tools, online message boards, and Apple iOS 5 input method.

As technology continues to develop, the clarity of images is getting higher and higher. Netizens have begun to create emoticons based on their own ideas. JPG format images are currently the most widely used images, supporting more than 16 million colors. At the same time, they can remove redundant images and color data while ensuring image quality, thereby reducing storage space and better disseminating them on the Internet. Therefore, it has become the preferred format for people to customize emoticons.

GIF format images are also widely used. They have dynamic image properties that JPG does not have. Although they only support 256 colors, they can make the originally static chat process become "dynamic" and various moods can be presented intuitively.

Step out of the "emoji universe" and talk about the new "heroes"

In the emoji universe, we see the most widely used image format, and in the wider web, we see new heroes appear.

Webp is an image format that provides both lossy and lossless compression. In its continuous development, it also adds static and dynamic program modes. Simply put, it is an image that combines the characteristics of jpg and GIF formats, and is smaller in size.

The size of animated images is 200px × 200px

You may have noticed that as long as the articles of WeChat public accounts are opened in a non-default browser, JPG will be automatically converted to Webp format. This should be an attempt by Tencent to use this image format.

Webp screenshot, resolution 700*467

I downloaded JPG images from WeChat PC and WeChat mobile, and downloaded Webp images from PC browser for comparison. There was no obvious difference in the quality of the three images, and the sizes were 32.5KB, 37.24KB and 25KB respectively. I then tested different images and got similar results. Webp images were the smallest. It can be seen that Webp format does have an advantage over JPG. However, it is a bit confusing that JPG images from WeChat PC are always smaller than those downloaded from WeChat mobile. It should also be pointed out that Photoshop and other software do not support Webp yet, and you need to install a plug-in to edit them.

Summarize

From the development history of emoticons, we can see the brief history of the development of image formats. These commonly used image formats have their own advantages in image quality, size, and animated images, so their application fields will be different. Webp, which combines the three characteristics of high image quality, small size, and animated images, although there are compatibility issues, may be able to join the emoticon "universe" in the future, so we can look forward to it.