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You can now tweet a 🍕 emoji to Domino's in order to initiate a pizza transaction.
Emoji use differs by country. "Canadians lead the charge in their use of money, violence, sports-related, raunchy, and even the poop emoji," says SwiftKey's chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood.
Americans are second behind Canada in their love of violent emojis, such as guns.
But one thing Americans also really, really love is pizza.
"Pizza was one of the most frequently used [emojis] in the U.S., as well as the chicken drumstick ... and I think it shows you that, versus other nations, you guys have particular food habits," Braidwood says.
Emoji In the Unicode standard at Wikipedia.
Draft Emoji Data at the Unicode Consortium.
💩/10.
[ED NOTE: The &#####; markup for these characters are legit. Are you able to see them, or are you seeing unknown character boxes? What font are you using? -LaminatorX]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:21PM
Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I don't see the point of 700 plus pictographs. At all. It's cute, but it introduces needless ambiguity and obfuscates communications - in many cases deliberately so. Emoji are useful only within tightly knit cliques to promote exclusivity. Hardly something I think worthy of standardizing, or even encouraging.
Ascii works well for me. Emoji - not so much. I'm not even tempted.
Also: get off my lawn.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:46PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @05:08PM
> China has shown us the problem with ideographic character sets in a digital age
Actually, knowing Chinese is the best way to find anything you want on the web in a few clicks: it seems like the content companies don't understand it. I suspect their Chinese employees may be playing dumb on all the sound substitution tricks.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:56PM
Could you elaborate on this? seems it implies that Chinese or other symbol languages is more efficient for search?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:19PM
They are more efficient for the end-user looking for copyrighted material, because it's hard to censor all the permutations of characters which will lead you to what you're looking for. The Chinese routinely use the wrong character (sounding close) to defeat simple google-and-DMCA techniques.
It's an elaborated version of putting a 1 for an i, with a whole lot more combinations available, many of which have real meanings you can't abruptly censor.
The Great Firewall knows how to handle a lot of these to protect the powerful in China (probably by having people dynamically entering the substitutions as they appear online), but the US content providers are far behind. It takes about 2 minutes to find just about anything within 24 hours of initial broadcast, original English version with added subtitles.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:27PM
But the Chinese government are mainly interested in suppressing free political ideas while the American corporations is more interested in suppressing copyrighted bits?
But i get your idea.
B3tt3r t0 b3 @ h@ck3r w1th sk1llz th@n b3ing squ@r3. ;-)
(sorry for all emoji fans that can't dechiper the last sequence.. ;-) )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @09:37PM
China has shown us the problem with ideographic character sets in a digital age. Let's try to learn from their lessons instead of recreating the problems.
Maybe that's because the computer age began in the US and UK, where programmers had keyboards and Roman character-based terminals.
But within a generation, calligraphic input devices should be seamless and sharp.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CRCulver on Thursday May 14 2015, @10:04PM
The problem with Chinese characters in the digital age isn't being able to enter the characters with a calligraphinc input device, it is being able to remember what you are supposed to input in the first place. Both China and Japan are seeing decreasing active command of characters, even if people are able to passively understand the character when it is shown to them. Over at Language Log [upenn.edu], Victor Mair has devoted several posts to this phenomenon.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stormwyrm on Friday May 15 2015, @06:37AM
It's not a new phenomenon, and appears to have started with the introduction of word processor and computer input methods for Japanese and Chinese in the 1980s. There's actually a word for it in Japanese: wāpuro-baka [jisho.org] (ワープロ馬鹿). Literally meaning "word-processor idiot", it refers to a person whose kanji-writing ability has deteriorated due to over-reliance on the input methods that produce kanji on a word processor or computer.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday May 15 2015, @08:40AM
The problem is not input, it's storage. Representing the 26 characters in the Roman alphabet is easy: you need 26 numbers, double that if you want upper and lower cases, and add a dozen or so if you want accents. That's it. You can then represent any word, because words are created combining letters. The designers of your computer, text editor, and fonts don't have to know anything about the words that you're going to write, they just give you the building blocks.
With Chinese, if you want to create a new word then you either need to combine existing ideographs (which sometimes works), or create a new one. If you create a new one, then you need to wait for a new version of the unicode standard to define a codepoint for it, then you need to wait for fonts to catch up. A few new Chinese glyphs are created each year and so this is a constant source of pain for people writing in Chinese.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @06:11PM
I agree that they're mostly useless. Though this thread made me think that it would be a good idea to show the name of an emoji when its hovered over.