Unicode.org:
Emoji are pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.
and
Additions beyond Unicode 7.0 are being addressed by the Unicode Technical Committee: as any new characters are approved, this document will be updated as appropriate.
The emoji you use built in to your smartphone or computer are regulated and approved by the Unicode Consortium. It’s a body that is constantly iterating the Emoji and their accompanying unicode. When you tap “woman with bunny ears” and send it to your friend, your phone really is sending” U+1F46F” to your friend. If you were to send that code to a phone over SMS that has software built before that emoji was standardized, they would simply see U+1F46F and not a picture of a woman with bunny ears.
The good thing about the Unicode standard is that it means people on any modern phone receive the same emoji..but not quite.
Each software developer can choose to create their own emoji that matches the look and feel of their operating system. Famously, Apple & Android have some very different emoji and sometimes this leads to confusion where a sheepish grin to an iOS user looks like gritting teeth angry person to their Android using friend.
At the end of the day, standards are good. Designs can be optimized but unicode allows for lighter messages (since sending photos to people takes more bandwidth) and a nearly standard agreed upon unicode combination on all devices.
If you want to do as I have and read all about the emoji process from Unicode directly, go here – http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/index.html#Selection_Factors
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Since emoji have to work everywhere, this group can only move as fast as they can to get everyone on board. Each emoji must be approved and implemented by every software company especially the OS makers. Can a company such as Nike have an emoji created? No.
1.2 Encoding Considerations
Unicode is the foundation for text in all modern software: it’s how all mobile phones, desktops, and other computers represent the text of every language. People are using Unicode every time they type a key on their phone or desktop computer, and every time they look at a web page or text in an application. It is very important that the standard be stable, and that every character that goes into it be scrutinized carefully. This requires a formal process with a long development cycle. For example, the ? dark sunglasses character was first proposed years before it was released in Unicode 7.0.
Characters considered for encoding must normally be in widespread use as elements of text. The emoji and various symbols were added to Unicode because of their use as characters for text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’ corporate standards, and other places, or in long-standing use in widely distributed fonts such as Wingdings and Webdings. In many cases, the characters were added for complete round-tripping to and from a source set, not because they were inherently of more importance than other characters. For example, the ? clamshell phone character was included because it was in Wingdings and Webdings, not because it is more important than, say, a “skunk” character.
In some cases, a character was added to complete a set: for example, a ? rugby football character was added to Unicode 6.0 to complement the ? american football character (the ⚽ soccer ball had been added back in Unicode 5.2). Similarly, a mechanism was added that could be used to represent all country flags (those corresponding to a two-letter unicode_region_subtag), such as the ?? flag for Canada, even though the Japanese carrier set only had 10 country flags.
Because an emoji must last in perpetuity, a trending topic, event, company logo and sports franchise mascot could never be made into an emoji. Even country flags are pushing the envelope because these flags change. Not often but political and design and branding changes happen to countries at some point in their life. An American football is the best you’re going to get versus a Washington Redskins logo or Fighting Irish character.
I feel this is the right course of action and luckily, Unicode hasn’t been infiltrated by brand / marketing experts who insist that Nike’s Swoosh is important enough to be made a standard emoji.
This Q&A covers more about how emoji are ratified and approved – http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html
Emoji and Emoticons are not the same thing. Via The Guardian:
An emoticon is a typographic display of a facial representation, used to convey emotion in a text only medium. Like so:
;-)
I use emoticons at least once a week usually just :) and :( (which I think WordPress will convert to their form of an emoji once I click the publish button)
Later in the Guardian Article:
Oh, and then there’s stickers, the custom pictures used in a number of instant messaging clients such as Facebook Messenger or Line. Some apps refer to them as emoji, but they’re fully specific to the app, and can’t be cut and paste anywhere else except when they’re treated as an image.
Stickers. These are small pictures that look just like emojis. These have become BIG business. Before this article, I was trying to figure out how a person that has downloaded a celebrity emoji app could share the emoji with her friend that does not have the app. It turns out, they’re universal just like picture-mail is universal. When you insert a sticker of your favorite Football Star’s signature pose in a message conversation via a custom keyboard, the person on the other end receives it as a photo. This includes people you text with over traditional SMS. I can’t receive picture mail via SMS since I use Google Voice. Instead, an hour after someone sends me a photo or sticker, I get an email like this:
Since I only get 5 picture-mails a year, this isn’t really an issue. Furthermore, I don’t know any friends that use custom-sticker applications, much less emoji. My sister texted me an emoji once and I blocked her for a week for mis-use of my screen-space.
BTW, the photo above is my old Golf R. I keep in touch with the buyer while he does modifications to it. We plan on dragging our cars at some point this Summer.
While preparing for this article (which was mostly because before writing it, I had no idea how any of this worked), I found an article on The Ringer (one of those publications who gave up all of their data to Medium which I’m strongly against), “The Kingdom of Crying Kim Kardashian”
There are dozens of private companies making what they call emoji but what they’re really doing is making stickers that are in a custom keyboard only available to people who download the app which usually costs $1.99 or more with in-app purchases to unlock more stickers.
These companies are named very similar to emoji like “Moji” or “iEmoji” or “Yemoji” but these companies don’t make unicode standard emoji icons. They make stickers. JPG/PNG files that are inserted via the custom keyboard and they’re HUGE business.
MuvaMoji is similar to Kardashian’s in that it features insider references only her fans alone would understand, many of which allude to Kardashian West’s husband and Rose’s ex, Kanye West. Within one week of its launch, MuvaMoji earned a reported $4 million.
4 million dollars from a custom keyboard of stickers.
: O
This is exactly why the symbol for Kimoji is her crying face: Whalerock says it was a conscious decision to own a moment in which Kardashian West was mocked and transform it into an icon. The more self-referential and self-deprecating the emoji pack, the more you invite your audience into your life. It’s a translator that allows users to speak the language of a celebrity. You don’t have to be talking about Kardashian West for her to be a part of the conversation. Kimoji is bigger than Kim herself.
: O
…According to a recent Pew study: “In a testament to the shifting landscape of texting, one third (33%) of teens with cell phones use messaging apps like Kik or WhatsApp.
: O
So, I think the media needs to do a better job of educating themselves on the differences between Emoticons, Emoji and Stickers. Articles like this now get me all up in arms: “Facebook Messenger for iOS Gains 1,500 New Emoji Characters”
No, Facebook did not add 1,500 emoji characters. They added 1,500 new stickers and because Facebook Messenger is cross-platform, they basically create their own version of unicode and each user downloads the stickers w/ the app itself and when they click a sticker in the app, it sends a bit of text to their friend which will display the stickers which is why being a huge messaging app used by a billion people is so great. Facebook can also inject those stickers into WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.com since it owns those properties.
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Despite all of this, I think stickers and emoji are temporary. People use them because they don’t like touch-typing on glass screens and I don’t blame them. You won’t find me using anything but emoticons ; )