It’s July 17th, and apparently that’s World Emoji Day. A day to celebrate the use of those cute little pictograms you use to convey a meaning with a single character by using them in all your social and day-to-day interactions.
First introduced to Android in Android Jelly Bean, Android users had been using them through various hacks previously but since Jelly Bean we’ve had system level access to emoji and Google has since been very good about keeping them up to date. Emoji are standardised by the Unicode Consortium. Who are they? According to them, they are a ‘non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards’. – basically they approve new text, including emoji.
We use Emoji a lot, almost two thirds of Aussies (61%) are regularly communicating using Emojis and a third of Aussies (31%) use Emojis to help fix arguments with a loved one according to Oppo. Then again, we probably rely on them too much with Oppo also finding that one in six (17%) Aussies think that Emoji should be recognised as its own official language.
It seems that people in relationships are definitely big users of emoji, with Oppo showing this infographic:
So, why is July 17th considered World Emoji Day? Well, it has its roots in iOS according to the World Emoji Day website:
Social networks are where we see more emoji than anything else, and Twitter has stats (of course they do). According to Twitter:
- People Tweet more beer emojis ? than coffee emojis ☕
- Twitter users have a favorite emoji monkey, the see no evil monkey ?
- There are more full heart emojis ? Tweeted than broken heart emojis ?
More specifically, Australians use these top 10 emoji:
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- ❤️
- ?
- ☺️
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?
And of course Twitter has created a custom emoji if you tweet using the custom hashtag #WorldEmojiDay:
It's July 17th, that means it's #WorldEmojiDay
— Daniel Tyson (@phroghollow) July 16, 2016
Emoji is all around us, we use it in social interactions, to fix relationships and also just as a quick way to convey a message. But earlier this year Google even made it relevant introducing emoji search for Google Photos. What started out as a perceived April Fools Day quickly became apparent was an awesome way to check for emoji
There’s an emoji for almost everything, but there’s room for improvement including adding in more diverse emoji as Google has recently done getting more gender diverse emoji added to the Unicode spec for male/female emoji options for more occupations and more.
New emoji will be showing up in Android Nougat when it’s released later this year, so stay tuned for that, but there’s plenty of emoji to choose from until then so share your favourite emoji in the comments below.
