Words Are Dead: Facebook Sticker Search Is Here

Facebook wants you to find the perfect sticker to convey your emotions in the post-text world.

Baked into Facebook’s website and the standalone Messenger app, which recently grew to more than 500 million users, are cute and colorful “stickers” that can be pasted into a message in lieu of actual words.

Communicating with cartoons rather than text can be fun, flirty and perhaps even legally prudent. (Just ask anyone whose emails have ever been made public.) But as Facebook adds more and more stickers to its arsenal, with themes ranging from “The Hunger Games” to “Business Fish”—a man in a suit who has a fish for a head—it’s becoming more difficult to sift through and find a one that will get your exact point across. Call it the abundant sticker paradox.

That’s why Facebook launched Sticker Search, to help you locate the most apropos cartoon or animation for your messaging partners. On the Web, just click the smiley face sticker button during a chat, and a search box will pop up. On the latest version of the Messenger app, a similar option will appear. (If you don’t see it, don’t panic. The feature may take time to roll out to all users.)

This may not sound like big news. OK, it’s not big news. But to demonstrate the sheer power of this new tool, we devised four true-to-life scenarios where a sticker provided a far sweeter response than anything we could write:

Four scenarios where a sticker is worth 1,000 words…OK, maybe more like 100.

 

Wilson Rothman / The Wall Street Journal

Facebook Stickers Are Now Available In Comments On Timelines, Groups And Events

Facebook Stickers – the cute, cartoonish images Facebook Messenger users take advantage of to spice up their conversations – are now rolling out to a wider audience. Facebook announced today that stickers will be available on comments found on people’s Timeline posts, Group posts and Event posts.

To access the stickers, users tap the smiley face icon in the bottom-right of any comment field on Facebook in order to pick the sticker they want to share with the others on the thread. The engineer on the project, Bob Baldwin, shared his thoughts on stickers when announcing the news on his own timetime this afternoon, explaining that “stickers will allow people to reply to a variety of posts in a more fun way than words alone.”

“You can now easily show your excitement for a post with good news, cheer up a friend who’s feeling down, and express a variety of more nuanced reactions,” he says.

Stickers and emoji are sometimes seen as silly things — and, well they are to some extent. After all, you can’t take a picture of a dog eating a cheeseburger or a cat riding a scooter all that seriously. But they also allow users to express their tone in a way that may not always come across in a digital format where interactions historically have been text-based.

Many times, we’ve seen threads where one friend makes a sarcastic comment and others jump on them in a viral mob of Facebook abuse – but the original commenter was only making a joke, as it turned out. It just fell flat. And they were attacked.

A sticker could have diffused the situation at the forefront by letting others know the poster was not serious. In a world where cyberbullying is now rampant, I’d actually argue that anything that can prevent comment threads from turning ugly is fairly important – even if it comes in the form of a bird with a lampshade on its head. (Yes, this is an actual sticker.)

Stickers also allow social networking and messaging users to engage in conversations more easily from a mobile phone since they can sum up an emotion or thought with just a picture. That’s obviously another key area for Facebook to focus on as it continues its shift to mobile.

However, enabling stickers in comments could also make scrolling through longer threads — like those on public pages — more time-consuming.

The stickers are now available to Facebook users across web and mobile, the company says.