Facebook Messenger apps seek to infuse emotion into texts

San Jose Mercury News (TNS)

SAN JOSE, California — Instant messages can feel trite and impersonal, but new apps can make it easier to express emotions beyond a text or emoji.

Facebook recently opened up Messenger to app developers, and there are already more than 40 ways for people to show their feelings with the click of a button. Want to make someone smile or laugh? Send a GIF or e-card. Feeling old? Create a selfie with wrinkles. Got the urge to serenade a lover? Turn text into a song. Angry or frustrated? Add fire effects to an image.

It may seem like silly fun, but companies that created these apps say they’re also part of an effort to breathe emotion into electronic communication that can feel impersonal and cripple face-to-face conversations.

Magisto CEO and co-founder Oren Boiman has seen it happen in restaurants where two people are sitting next to one another, but their eyes are fixated on their smartphones as they text. When you converse, Boiman said, it’s about more than just the words — there is also emotion conveyed through hand gestures and facial expressions.

“There’s almost a battle to restore everything that we lost. Plain text is in a way the most efficient and the worst way of communication,” he said.

It’s also hard to read emotion through an instant message, he said. Even the phrase “You’re really funny, you know?” is ambiguous in a text where sarcasm is hard to read.

So the Menlo Park company developed an app for Messenger called Magisto Shot, which Boiman said is meant to help people show how they feel.

You can take a photo, select a “vibe” — such as happy, sad, scary, love, hyper, funny and scary — and Magisto Shot then adds music, filters and effects based on the mood, turning the image into a short video you can send via Messenger.

“We want to help people express things that we almost forgot that we do with human communication,” Boiman said.

Showing people how you feel along with making statements about what’s happening is an important part of language, said linguist John McWhorter, an associate professor at Columbia University.

Since texting mimics spoken language, he said, people are not content with statements that don’t convey more than just information.

“Nobody would have expected that the telegrams that we send to each other today are actually very warm, spontaneous and human compared to anything anybody could have imagined 20 years ago,” he said.

Concert pianist Bob Taub knows firsthand how music can sway people’s emotions. Taub is the president and CEO of MuseAmi, a New Jersey company, that also created a Messenger version of its app Hook’d.

The app allows people to select a song based on their mood, record themselves singing with the backtrack of the songs like they’re a lead singer, add effects and then send the video clip to a friend through Messenger. If they’re feeling like a boss, they can pick the song “All About that Bass” by Meghan Trainor, or if they’re feeling sexy they can sing along to “Let’s Get It On”, by Marvin Gaye.

“We’re marrying [messaging] and [music] in the social media platform to allow people to infuse their messages with more personal character through singing and videos,” Taub said.

There are also plenty of apps on Messenger meant to make people laugh.

As GIFs became more popular online, Camoji founder Carlos Whitt said that the company saw an opportunity to create a tool that would allow people to create their own GIFs using a camera and filters such as “drunk”, “cool blue”, “strobe” and “censored”.

“If you talked to the average person on the street and ask how to create an animated GIF, most of them would have no idea,” he said. “We wanted to build the simplest and most playful tool out there for creating animated GIFs.”

The San Francisco start-up has tried creating several apps before meant to create simple and fun experiences that could connect people together. But the idea of a GIF camera just clicked.

“At a bar you show it to someone and they instantly smile. As soon as we saw that, we knew that we were on to something,” Whitt said.