As you might've heard, we potentially have 250 new emojis to play around with.
That's right, emoji fans, 250 more pictographic symbols are headed to the web and all your devices. These new emoji include everything from pocket calculators, oncoming fire engines and a hand flipping us all off. Awesome.
Now for the buzzkill. Even though the new emoji are part of the official Unicode 7.0 specification, it will take time for the characters to make their way to your smartphones, web browsers and desktop computers.
That means it could be months or even years before you can flip off your pals via text with a symbol.
To explain why we can't currently attach a movie-ticket emoji to a text inquiring about Friday night plans, we have to look at what emoji is, how it exists, and the complicated universe it exists within.
Emoji: a brief history
Emoji symbols, as we know them today, date back to late 1990s Japan. NTT DoCoMo, the predominant Japanese mobile carrier, created a set of 172 pictographic images to use with its i-mode messaging platform.
The characters became an increasingly popular way for Japanese users to text and communicate with one another. The characters were so popular, in fact, that the other major Japanese mobile carriers — au and SoftBank Mobile — followed suit and created their own versions of emoji symbols.
The problem, however, was that none of these emoji sets worked perfectly with one another. Although Japanese phones could read emoji, the characters didn't show up for anyone outside of Japan.
Fortunately, there was a solution: Unicode, a standard designed to make character encoding consistent consistent across the world. Unicode's official goal is to provide "a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language."
It's what makes it possible to type out something such as E = mc², and have it appear the same way to anyone on any device.
When you see strange characters or white blocks while reading text on the web, it's typically because the character encoding setting in your web browser is incorrect (or because whoever published the text used improper Unicode symbols).
The Unicode Standard is mammoth in size, covering over 110,000 characters. It is governed by the nonprofit Unicode Consortium, members of which include Apple, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Yahoo.
In 2010, hundreds of emoji characters were encoded as part of the Unicode 6.0 specification. But getting characters added to the Unicode Standard is a long, drawn-out process. In addition to the original Japanese emoji characters, the Unicode additions included other new characters — such as country maps and European symbols.
What this means is that there is a data file that maps every individual emoji symbol to a Unicode code point or sequence.
But this is just the standardization of the symbols. Supporting emoji, as well as the specific design of the emoji characters, is up to software makers.
As of Unicode 7.0, there are about 550 characters that could be considered emoji, and another 240 emoji that represent national flags.
Not all emoji are created equal
As the very helpful emoji FAQ on Unicode.org states, emoji characters don't have to look the same everywhere they are used.
The Unicode standard merely offers a description, a Unicode code (such as U+1F36E) and a basic pictograph. It's up for operating system creators and font makers to customize the emoji as they see fit.
That's why emoji look different depending on what platform you're using. Tim Whitlock put together this fantastic table that shows how software vendors display emoji.
Apple has long been one of the biggest emoji proponents. In Japan, Apple has supported emoji since iOS 2.2. With iOS 5, Apple moved to the new Unicode standard. Apple has had support for emoji in OS X since OS X 10.7 Lion. That means that you can add emoji characters to virtually any Mac app's data entry screen. It also means that Safari (on iOS and OS X) supports emoji natively. Apple even has its own font, Apple Color Emoji, to provide color images for each of 889 glyphs. Of the various emoji sets in wide-use, Apple's are probably closer to the "official" method.
Microsoft added emoji support with Windows 8. Microsoft also supports emoji on Windows Phone.
Google has its own emoji library too — and while various Android apps have supported emoji for quite some time, the official Google Keyboard didn't get emoji support until November — and even then, emoji was only added to KitKat.
Frustratingly, even though Google was one of the earliest proponents of emoji, the company still hasn't brought emoji support to its Chrome browser on the desktop. Which means that if you try to view emoji messages in Chrome, you probably just see a bunch of blank squares. There are some workarounds — notably extensions such as Chromoji. Emojis do work in Chrome for Android.
Meanwhile, as long as your operating system supports emoji, Firefox will too.
Because emoji support isn't consistent across operating systems or web browsers, some services have opted to create their own emoji sets. Twitter, for example, has its own emoji icons for the web. Designed by the wizards at the Iconfactory, Twitter supports more than 800 emoji that are in its own font. Which means that no matter what web browser you use, you can view emoji on Twitter.com.
And remember: Just because an operating system support emoji doesn't mean it supports every emoji in the Unicode specification. Vendors can choose which characters to adopt or not adopt. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way for users to know what system supports what.
Who picks what emojis get adopted?
So who is responsible for deciding which emoji get added to the Unicode spec? The Unicode Consortium.
Unicode 7.0 was just released, but the process of adding the new emoji was years in the making. As a result, plans for emoji diversity will take time to implement.
On Unicode's emoji FAQ, the consortium explains why the new emoji additions include sunglasses, but not more ethnic diversity in the faces shown.
"There is a long development cycle for characters, so the sunglasses character was first proposed years before Unicode 7.0 was released. Any proposals under consideration will also take time to assess and develop."
That said, most emoji descriptions are open-ended enough that emoji fonts can be designed to be more ethnically diverse on the software end.
After the Unicode Consoritum adopts new emoji to its standards base, it's up to operating system makers to support emoji as they see fit. Some emoji are very region-specific — and as a result, some emoji might only be available to certain countries or users by default.
And although operating system vendors can't make their own emojis per se, there is a private use area that companies can use to include their own variants. For example, Apple has supported the Apple symbol on Apple devices for years. The symbol is represented by U+F8FF.
So when do I get to flip people off using emoji?
It depends. Because Google, Microsoft and Apple are all members of the Unicode Consortium, it's reasonable to assume they were already aware of the new additions.
We could see updates as soon as the new versions of each respective operating system is released — but it may take even more time than that. After all, each font needs to draw its own symbol.
Even after systems gain support, there is no guarantee older devices will be updated for the new characters. So it won't be safe to send the new emoji for quite some time — unless you know the people you text have a device with the latest and greatest software.