💬 The Wrap
Hey! It's just a few days now until World Emoji Day which is on 📅 July 17 each year.
Voting in our World Emoji Awards closes 2pm ET on World Emoji Day (winners to be announced live from the New York Stock Exchange) and the new musical Emojiland has its world premiere in New York City in the evening.
Other companies are likely to be making announcements in the coming days, so if you're not already following @WorldEmojiDay on Twitter, this is the best way to keep up with the latest.
Also, scroll down to grab the latest episode of the Emoji Wrap podcast where Google's emoji boss Jennifer Daniel and I talk about the very contents of this newsletter.
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📰 News
📝 Researchers Gather for the International Workshop on Emoji Understanding
It's perhaps too soon to tell if "emoji research" neatly fits into how we study written language, gestures, design, or if it truly is its own area worth studying. I suspect the fact it crosses so many different fields of interest is what makes it worth looking at. (if you missed this, a number of the same speakers will be attending Emojicon this weekend).
🧑 Inclusive Emojis Coming Back to Android
A more detailed look at Android P's upcoming emoji changes. One that stood out to me: a hint at more gender inclusive people.
🐦 Twemoji 11.0 Emoji Changelog
Twitter is the first major vendor to roll out full Emoji 11.0 support on platforms that implement Twemoji. These are out now on the web (and Twitter for Android).
💭 Interesting
📈 Facebook Reveals Most and Least Used Emojis
Turns out, a lot of us mostly use Facebook Messenger to send birthday greetings. More stats from Facebook here in the lead-up to World Emoji Day.
🐛 Apple's China-Friendly Censorship Caused an iPhone-Crashing Bug
What's not new in this story is Apple censoring the flag for Taiwan on Chinese iPhones (and other devices where the region is set to China), but this is the first I've seen of this crash that is related to that functionality. (h/t John Vorhees)
💜 The color heart distribution across vendor implementations
A graphic from Twitter user FakeUnicode showing how the colored heart emojis vary quite a lot between different vendors.
🚡 Here Are 13 Ways to Use the Aerial Tramway, the Emoji No One Likes
The trouble with any least-used emoji list is that it's never least used for long.
👱♀️ Apple's New Memoji vs. Samsung's AR Emoji
Testing out Samsung's AR Emoji earlier in the year I found it to produce pretty creepy-looking humans. The Memoji characters are much cuter, although you do have to build them from scratch as they don't use the camera for creation like Samsung does.
👩⚖️ Emojis Show Intention to Rent Apartment, Says Judge
For as long as we have emojis, we'll have court cases that involve ambiguous communications using them. In this instance: 💃🏻👯✌️☄️🐿️🍾 (for a moment I thought this URL was broken, but then saw it was the CMS failing at emojis in the title)
🗣 Internal Documents Show How Facebook Decides When a Poop Emoji Is Hate Speech
A number of people asked me how a 🦆 duck could be considered hate speech, and tbh I'm not sure. These types of leaked documents likely make more sense in the context of training that went along with them. At least I hope so.
🎨 Perfecting the language of emojis
"But the salad emoji wasn’t the most frequently cited emoji in Google bug complaints. That honor goes to the upside-down-smiley-face emoji."
🥗 Google Changes Salad Emoji to Be Vegan by Removing Egg
The word "vegan" in these headlines turned what might have been a fairly mundane change (removing the egg from a salad emoji) into divisive news that spread much further than usual.
🎙 Podcasts
🙍♂️ Let's make every man cry with Jennifer Daniel from Google
In this month's podcast of-the-same-name-as-this-newsletter I talk with Google's Jennifer Daniel about the very contents of this newsletter!
🤗 Lastly
While we're here, let me share something about the origins of World Emoji Day.
Back in 2014, Emojipedia had been running for one year when I thought it would be nice to have a day to celebrate all the emoji developments that were taking place at the time.
My original thought was to call it World Emoji Day and hold it on November 22 which is the date that emoji support first came to iOS (in 2008). Another consideration was September 19 - the date that iOS 6.0 was released which was the first mainstream release from Apple to support emojis outside Japan.
I recall planning this around early July, and was soon to make an announcement about the date. Just before doing so, it did strike me that both of those dates were going to be pretty busy in the news cycle given that every year a major new iOS release comes out around September-November.
Simultaneously, the notion that July 17 was fast approaching came up, and this seemed far better. Not only due to the time of year but also as people did already like to share the calendar emoji on this date, if only to point out that "it's the date on the calendar emoji today".
Yes, at the time only the Calendar emoji on iOS showed July 17, but other platforms were lagging in emoji support at the time so Apple's calendar emoji was the main one people were familiar with.
You might notice the creation date for the various @WorldEmojiDay channels is barely a week before July 17. The last-minute decision seemed to be the right one, and here we are now about to celebrate the fifth annual day. For those who got involved in some of the earliest years, thank you! I genuinely enjoy seeing what people and companies come out with now each year.
(Apple of course chose July 17 for other reasons. The 📅 Calendar emoji included July 17 originally due to iCal for Mac being announced on July 17 - so the iCal icon itself originally showed July 17. Google later updated the calendar so users didn't have a confusing experience when people would tweet about World Emoji Day!)