Now What? LOL is Out!

© tiero

****Rant Alert****

I've done a few rants over the years, always trying to turn them into lessons to help you grow your business. My goal has always been to help photographers raise the bar on the quality of more than just their images. Well, this one has little to do with much of anything about business.

I just read recently that using "LOL" is now out of style and has been replaced by "haha". From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

The cool kids at Facebook Inc. are telling e-laughers everywhere that “haha” and emoji are in, and “lol” is out....“Haha” was the most popular choice, with more than half of all laughs, while emojis accounted for a third. It seems “lol” -- the popular acronym for laugh out loud -- is no longer hip. Only 1.9 percent of users are “lol”-ing, meaning the expression could soon be going the way of once popular phrases such as “rotfl” (rolling on the floor laughing) and “lmao” (laughing my a** off).

Look, I get it. I'm older than many of you. Obviously I have expressions that I'm comfortable with, but it took me hundreds of hours wandering through cyberspace to get used to LOL and now I'm no longer hip. Well, to the rocket scientists in the back room at Facebook I'm sending you one giant raspberry. I refuse to give up my LOL along with WTF, LMAO and KMA.

The truth is we're an industry of acronyms. We've got ISO, LED, CCD, AE, AF, AF-L, DSLR, DPI and HDR, just to name a few. Then we've got PPA, ASMP, WPPI, APA, PMA, CES and again the list goes on and on. Plus, they all think they're BFD's.

So, I'm sticking with what I like.  "LOL" is one key stroke shorter than "HAHA", making it 25% more efficient. And, since time is our most valuable commodity, I'm saving time in writing and space in my posts and tweets.

Next thing you know somebody's going to tell me that Kodachrome is no longer available! LOL