Communication is about much more than stringing words together. With the intervention of new technologies, the ability to express oneself has been enriched with all kinds of images and symbols. This leads us to the massive use of emojis being detected in places like the social network Twitter. The site EmojiTracker keeps a real-time record of emojis on Twitter, and from what we've seen, people are very happy there…
The Rise of Emojis
Consider this: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻… For those not used to this kind of expression, it's as if the letters had suffered some kind of accident, but in the end it's very clear that someone throwing a table in the air is particularly annoyed. Ideograms aren't exactly new, however, thanks to the magic of the Web, social networks, mobile devices, instant messaging and other elements, they have evolved dramatically. History tells us that the first emoji was created between 1998 and 1999 by a certain Shigetaka Kurita, while working on the i-mode platform of NTT DoCoMo. From there, emojis exploded, and we can find them almost everywhere.
The Most Used Emojis Right Now
With its natural limit of 140 characters per message, Twitter has become fertile ground for emojis. Many sites help users copy and paste them, but the EmojiTracker portal keeps a real-time record of the most used emojis. In recent hours, some colleague sites made references to EmojiTracker results, but I noticed that they used outdated information. Right now, the most used emoji on Twitter is the face with tears of joy, accumulating more than 500 million uses. Three different variants of hearts occupy the second, third and fourth positions, while the Top 5 is closed by the ("unamused") face, which reminds us of the meme of a certain Olympic athlete, apparently disappointed by her silver medal.
If we look at the other end of the list, we discover that the five least used emojis are the one prohibiting bicycles, the suspended monorail, and three things we surely all hate: passport control, customs, and baggage claim. How did anyone think of making an emoji that represents the damn customs? It's part of the mystery surrounding these popular symbols, no more and no less.
