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It's no secret that in our world today, we love our emojis. They've become as normal in our conversations as a period or question mark.
Everyone with a smartphone or tablet - or even an email or Facebook account... In other worlds, EVERYONE... Has seen those little smiley, frowny, animal, or holiday icons showing up all over the place! You see them in text messages, Facebook chats, emails, and even Instagram posts.
To date, the most popular emoji, the happy face with tears, has been used nearly 830-million times. The wildly popular heart image is used over 370-million times. Even some of the least popular ones that look more like airport signs have been used more than 20-thousand times.
The world of emoji is constantly changing. Earlier this year, we saw the new arrival of ethnically diverse version - which developer Unicode made available for iOS and Android. It's even common for people to write out song lyrics and movie plots using just emoji! Even our passcodes to get into our devices are getting an emoji makeover!
Researchers have studied this phenomenon, trying to figure out how emojis enrich our communications. They took a group of people and gave them a series of tasks to solve. One group had access to six emoticons, and the other did not. They found that those little icons gave participants a greater feeling of satisfaction, than those who just had plain text. The researchers concluded that we use emojis to help reduce ambiguity and intensify or tone down our expression.
There's even apps where you can create your own emoji. This is called Imoji and lets you turn your friend's face into one. Or choose from millions of images that others have created. This free app saves the image to your camera roll - and you can send it out to your friends.
Utah company Stately Type Tees has discovered this, and makes amazing t-shirts with all smiley faces, and even the classic tears of joy emoji. You can find more information on their company at StatelyType.com.
