As part of the ongoing dumbing-down of society, there’s now a keyboard that will help you avoid using actual words during the process of communication!  Srsly!  They’re called Fast Finger Keyboards, and they features an incredible array of time-saving shortcuts for such common online phrases as L8R, LOL, THX, and TTYL.  There’s even a handy shortcut for www. (and I’d imagine one for .com, too).

I have no doubt that this is going to catch on as people get more and more used to TXTspeak and auto-fill-in features.  The company made their big debut at the 2010 Toy Fair in New York a few weeks ago, and the Fast Finger keyboard is going to be everywhere one of these days.  I mean, it’s bound to the F-row keys, and those are rarely used anyway, so why not make them a little more useful by adding some shift-text options?  Or, I guess alt-text options.  I’m not sure how it works for those higher-up keys.

If my keyboard had an LOL button, I’d still not use it.  If I can’t bother to type in LOL by hand, obviously it wasn’t that funny to begin with, IMHO.