Research In Motion (RIM) today announced that the short form of BlackBerry Messenger, BBM, has been added to the latest edition of the Collins English Dictionary. A closer look shows that the new words were actually added earlier this week, on Monday. Furthermore, it’s easy to see RIM doesn’t really have that much to gloat about, once you actually look at some of the other submissions.
You can see the full list for yourself over at the Collins blog. Aside from BBM, here are few words that stood out to me: amazeballs, bashtag, Bing, throw someone under the bus, cyberbully, cyberstalking, data cap, Facebook, FaceTime, fanboy, frenemy, hyperconnectivity, IM, mummy porn, liveblog, livestream, lolz, photobomb, SMS, tiger mother, touch-ready, tweetup, Twitterer, and Twittersphere.
Despite some of these ridiculous additions, RIM declared that BBM, which has over 56 million users worldwide, has now “officially entered modern-day vocab,” that it is being recognized “as one of the world’s most popular mobile social networks,” and that it’s an honor that a word used by millions of its customers “has now been officially welcomed into the English language.”
On top of all that, the Canadian company released this trippy video to celebrate: Update – The video was pulled right as I published this. It was pretty weird, so don’t worry, you’re not missing much.
I wonder why Apple hasn’t published a blog post about the FaceTime addition, why Microsoft isn’t celebrating Bing’s success (no, seriously, this one I don’t get), and why Facebook isn’t all over its latest milestone. Sometimes it’s just better not to underline every single achievement your company makes.
Don’t get me wrong, I love BBM. I use it every single day. I just think that RIM needs to tone it down on the marketing side of things and get better products out the door sooner. Then again, if I didn’t see this tidbit, I wouldn’t have been able to write this in an article: Amazeballs!
P.S. The first definition on Urban Dictionary for “Amazeballs” is hilarious: “Some annoying term Perez Hilton keeps trying to make happen, by saying it repeatedly, even though it makes no sense, and getting twitter followers to try and make it a trending topic, to make himself more famous for no reason.”
P.P.S. Looks like Perez succeeded.
Image credit: stock.xchng
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