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