Ever wonder which emoji are most popular with users? Now Emojitracker is tracking the Twitterverse to find out which icons are being used right now.
The results are not terribly surprising, all sorts of smiley faces, hearts, and hand gestures dominate. The top slot seemed out of place until I realized that it is the emoji version of the “❤” or “♥” glyph, also know as “black heart suit.” Why is it coming up this way, even though I can’t find it on my own emoji keyboard? Stackoverflow explains, “In iOS 5 some of these special characters are rendered as emoji, and ♥ is one of them.”
And what about those two rather similar seeming smiley faces with rosy cheeks that appear in the top 10? The one of the top row is called “White Smiling Face,” while the one on the middle row above is titled “Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes.” What’s the difference? Like most emoji it is up to interpretation.
The least popular emoji on Twitter have to do with luggage and Asian languages (I’m guessing this would be different if Emojitracker were using Weibo, Mixi or another Asian microblogging or social network for their data). The “lost luggage” emoji ends up at the bottom of the list, while the “Squared Katakana Kono” emoji (“here” in Japanese) is second to last.
h/t @juliaxgulia
This is a regression to pictograms. Linguistically we are devolving. Would you like fries with that?
yes, there’s an emoji for that.