Get the latest tech news
Emoji: The Complete History
More than just cute pictures, these digital icons are a lingua franca for the digital age.
In 2007, a software internationalization team at Google decided to lead the charge, petitioning to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit group that works sort of like the United Nations to maintain text standards across computers. In 2017, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proposed an emoji mosquito as a way to better describe mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and Zika. For now, the feature only works with a handful of animal emoji—the cat, dog, monkey, panda, pig, rabbit, chicken, fox, alien, robot, unicorn, and, for some reason, pile of poop—but it could one day include everything with a face in the emoji library.
Or read this on Wired
