You most likely use them. We all love them. They portray our feelings and describe what we want to express without taking so much of our limited 140 characters. I’m talking about emojis. Those lifeless little icons you’re always tapping away happily on your virtual keyboard. Did you know there’s an independent body tasked with looking after them? The Unicode Consortium is a body that oversees and monitors the way in which text is presented across the software industry. It has come up with 250 new emojis.
The new emojis are set to be included into the current standard set of emojis soon and will include emoji for things ranging from satellites, thermometers, hard disks and one-button mice to weird gestures like the middle finger. Yes, the middle finger. See that guy who pissed you off last night as you watched the World Cup? You can simply tweet them that emoji and your feelings would’ve ben correctly expressed and conveyed in a single tap. Just recently, popular Android keyboard app Swiftkey released an update that brought emojis to the keyboard. Android gained universal support for emojis with the 4.4 (KitKat) update.
The new emojis are part of changes brought about by the pending implementation of a new standard by the Unicode Consortium, the Unicode Standard version 7.0. The new version will also include two other important Unicode specifications: the Unicode Collation Algorithm (the standard for sorting Unicode text) and the Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing (for processing non-ASCII URLs)
